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From the Event Guide archive!
This article refers to an event which took place on, or until, 22 August 2006 Film Reviews MIAMI VICE Admirably respectful of his audience’s intelligence, Mann drops us right into the deep end from the start without even an opening credits sequence to soften the drop. Crocket (Farrell) and Tubbs (Foxx) are in a crowded, hectic nightclub trying to bring down a sadistic pimp. But it’s the pimp’s lucky night, it seems, as Tubbs gets an urgent call from an informant on another job that has gone awry. See what I mean? The film goes straight to the narrative with none of the traditional storytelling foreplay. So, hot-headed Crocket and his more deliberate partner are promptly assigned to look into what went wrong. Little is known about the gang, except that they’re a white-supremacist group involved in narcotics. Drugs are the contraband of choice in Miami, so the cops will pose as couriers for a South American drug lord who may be connected to the Arians. The drug lord has a rather striking wife who works the books called Isabella (Gong Li). Crockett has is eye on her for reasons that are not as obvious as it first seems… Like so many cinematic spies/assassins/cops, the heroes of ‘Miami Vice’ seem to be jacks of all trades, each of which comes in useful at some stage- driving, hand-to-hand combat, gunplay, piloting and even salsa dancing. Watching these super-cops negotiating and creeping their way deeper and deeper undercover is fun, and it’s the kind of thing Mann does best. Less effective, sadly, is the relationship between Crockett and Isabella. In Asian cinema Gong Li is a big star, maybe even an icon. But, like so many foreign stars imported to Hollywood, her English is, frankly, not up to scratch. Her dialogue with Farrell sounds stilted. She delivers her lines awkwardly while he mumbles to her in that solemn tough guy way. In my experience, when you talk to those who have not yet commanded your language: You. Speak. To. Them. Slowly. Like. This. Funnily, the chemistry between them is electric when they’re dancing, exchanging glances or kissing; in other words when they’re not speaking. While that was my only real complaint with ‘Miami Vice’ (and in fairness, it’s a big one), many other viewers will be more disappointed by the relative lack of action scenes, the humourlessness and unyielding darkness of the film. But the director’s legion of fans should have no problem with ‘Miami Vice’. This is not a blockbuster action movie, but a sombre, intelligent, stunningly photographed, crime drama. – Joe Griffin
‘Miami Vice’ opened nationwide on Friday 4th August, certified 15A. www.miamivice.com
MONSTER HOUSE If the blandly inoffensive locality within which the film is set – a familiar American suburbia, replete with moppets on tricycles, and trick-or-treaters – puts you in the mind of Steven Spielberg, then give yourself a gold star as ‘Monster House’ is indeed part financed by the director’s production company Amblin, and it is fair to say that, from the very beginning, his fingerprints are all over it. Our hero is DJ, an inquisitive young man who eyes the spooky, dilapidated house opposite his own with a mixture of curiosity and dread. Fearful tales are circulated about the place, mainly concerning Nebbercracker, its gnarled, child-hating curmudgeon of an owner, a man advanced in wickedness who delights in confiscating any plaything which happens to stray onto his precious lawn. When a confrontation with the Gollum-like old man goes disastrously awry, DJ, along with his chubby sidekick Chowder (a nod to ‘The Goonies’ here), finds himself incarcerated in the bowels of his house, a sentient dwelling of terrible aspect and murderous intent. Possessed by the spirit of Nebbercracker’s dead wife (voiced in a cameo by Kathleen Turner), the place has transmuted into a living entity, hell bent on raining fire and brimstone upon the young irritations whom have infiltrated themselves into her walls. I have no doubt that the technology underlying this vibrant romp is state of the art, and probably just as fancy as that of Pixar, but the visuals it has been employed to render hail from a CGI bereft era – the 1980s to be precise. The suburban setting, the shape and look of the characters, the vacationing parents and surly babysitters, almost every aspect of this movie has its antecedents in the decade that style forgot. Good, creepy fun. – David O Mahony
‘Monster House’ opens nationwide on Friday 11th August, certified PG. www.sonypictures.com/movies/monsterhouse
LOOK BOTH WAYS Employing a criss-crossing structure with many different characters, all of whom are interlinked by one governing event – in this case the death of a man hit by a train – ‘Look Both Ways’ calls to mind any number of recent films which ask us to examine the role of fate and chance in our lives. The core characters, the ones around which the many others radiate, are Nick, a photojournalist of world-renown who discovers as the film begins that he has testicular cancer. It has metastasised and spread to his lungs and doctors are unwilling to rate his chances of recovery. Dazed and confused, he takes his camera down to the crash site, capturing a front-page image in the process. There he meets Meryl, a witness to the incident, a sensitive, frightened woman who imagines disaster around every corner, her illusory fears being animated in brief colourful interludes. They strike up hesitant conversation, each wary of revealing too much of themselves. Their burgeoning relationship, which develops in fits and starts throughout the film, acts as a fulcrum for the other plotlines and incidents that make up this eventual picture. ‘Look Both Ways’ is pretty engaging stuff, with plenty of good performances, but it is undermined by director Sarah Watt’s insistence on ladling on the saccharine at every available opportunity, a policy which manifests itself most irritatingly in the overuse of maudlin pop songs played over montages of various cast members looking wan and damaged. Such sequences invariably led to a surfeit of crying and hugging. This aside, ‘Look Both Ways’ is more than decent. – David O Mahony
‘Look Both Ways’ opens at the Irish Film Institute, on Dublin’s Eustace Street, and other selected cinemas, on Friday 18th August. www.lookbothways.com.au
THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE Directed by Mary Harron. Director Mary Harron is no stranger to controversy, having been crucified a few years back for bringing the adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ ‘American Psycho’ to the screen (and a good job she did too). It seems fitting that her follow up feature should also be about a provocative character making waves in an innocent, naïve decade (here it’s the 1950s). ‘Notorious’ looks at the career of real-life actress and model Bettie Page (Moll). The film opens in the midst of a Senatorial investigation into the publication of lewd material, headed by prudish chair Estes Kefauver (Straithairn, in a reversal of the role he played in ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’). Central to the case is one Bettie Page, who features in a number of pictures depicting bondage and fetishism. A flashback to Nashville introduces the viewer to Bettie, a studious, God-fearing wholesome gal with big dreams. After a disastrous young marriage, Page flees to New York to cut her teeth as a model and, through meeting mild pornographers Irving and Paula Klaw (Bauer and Taylor), becomes a sex icon to a generation of men with an under-mattress stash. Harron shoots with a fusion of beautiful monochrome and evocative, pastel Technicolor to faithfully recreate the cinematic visual of the 1950s. However, she and co-writer Guinevere Turner adopt a ‘wink-wink’ tone that neuters the sexual content, even as it mocks the conservatism and hypocritical morality of that decade, which seems wholly anachronistic today. Or is it? Historical movies are more often about the present than they are the past, and if Bettie’s story ends with the triumph of reactionary ideology, perhaps Harron is drawing comparisons with the America of George W. Bush? Be that as it may, this tack lends a fallow, sometimes shallow treatment to the characterisation of Page. The complexities of reconciling her strict religious faith with her career are never really teased out, and her motivations behind what she does are hinted at rather than explored. Whatever about these niggles, there can be no faulting Gretchen Moll’s expressive, brave and fiercely committed lead performance. Truly, a star is born. Declan Cashin
‘The Notorious Betty Page’ was released in selected cinemas on Friday 4th August, certificate 15A. www.thenotoriousbettiepage.co.uk
LADY IN THE WATER This peculiar, clumsy, distractingly self-important tale takes place in a troubled America very much bogged down in a foreign war. Cleveland Heep (Giamatti) is the damaged care-taker of a Philadelphia co-op, who finds a mysterious woman in the building's swimming pool. This ethereal sea creature – a ‘narf’ - is named Story (all the metaphorical readings should begin....now!) and is played by Bryce Dallas Howard, who lent considerable dramatic weight to Shyamalan's last film 'The Village'. It turns out Story is a character from an ancient Oriental fairy-tale - the mythology of which was created entirely for the film - who has come to deliver an important message to humanity. She's being pursued by a killer dog from her oceanic world - kind of like T-1000 in Terminator 2 - who is striving to stop Story from unveiling crucial details to Heep and the other tenants, all of whom have a role to play in the discovery of the message that will ultimately redeem humanity. It should come as little surprise that this Messianic message that’s destined to shape the future is communicated through an as-yet unwritten book - and that the writer of said book is played by Shyamalan himself in the movie. That kind of self-absorption, matched equally by a total absence of any semblance of narrative cohesion, is what makes ‘Lady’ so flawed. Shyamalan clearly had his back up throughout the shoot, and this trickles into the film by way of a bizarre self-reflexive dig at film critics that just doesn’t work. The movie itself may have problems – big problems – but leading man Paul Giamatti is superb an actor enough to keep such a messy enterprise some way grounded. In the end, Shyamalan did achieve one allegorical task with the movie because Story’s tale involves a plot that a large group of people struggle to put together and understand. That is the perfect stand-in for the plot of ‘Lady in the Water’ itself. Declan Cashin
'Lady in the Water' opens nationwide on Friday 11th August, certified 12A. http://ladyinthewater.warnerbros.com/
ATOMISED One of the great follies of translating a novel such as this to the big screen is that no director, no matter how innovative he is, could ever hope to visually replicate the ideas contained within. I was reminded of David Cronenberg’s comments when he was describing why he decided against a literal reading of William Burrough’s Naked Lunch, that it would cost a million dollars, and be banned in every country on earth, a dilemma he solved in imaginative fashion by making a film about the book’s creation. The director of Atomised – Oskar Roehler – has however failed to find a workable structure upon which to hang Houellebecq’s ideas about sex, religion, and cloning, and the resulting film lacks the provocative sting of the novel. It focuses principally on two half-brothers, Michel and Bruno, one an introverted molecular biologist who lives a lonely, almost asexual life, the other a would-be libertine, obsessed with sexual gratification. Raised by a sexually experimental and somewhat negligent mother, the film follows these polarised individuals journey to adulthood, documenting Bruno’s increasingly selfish behaviour and Michel’s gradual withdrawal into himself. Roehler has juggled the chronology of the book, beginning in the middle and moving back and forth through various seminal incidents in the lives of the opposing leads. But this structural trickery fails to compensate for his fundamental refusal or inability to properly engage with the meat of his source material. – David O Mahony
‘Atomised’ runs exclusively at the Irish Film Institute, on Dublin’s Eustace Street, until Thursday 24th August. www.irishfilm.ie
HARSH TIMES Bale plays Jim David, whom we first see in the home of his girlfriend, a rundown shack in Mexico, plagued by vivid dreams of his recent war experiences. This we learn is his respite from LA’s urban jungle, a safe house he retreats to when things get too jittery. Back on home turf he stops by to see his best friend Mike (Freddy Rodriguez, the facial reconstruction expert from ‘Six Feet Under’) whom has recently become unemployed and now lives with his girlfriend Rita (Desperate Housewife Eva Longoria). Mike is to spend the day running about the city, dropping off various resumes to prospective employers, and when Jim generously offers to act as his chauffeur it is the beginning of an odyssey of sorts, and one that can only end in tears. It quickly transpires that Jim cares not one jot for the furthering of his friend’s career, and the resumes are swiftly despatched through the car window. Jim is hankering for a good time, and the protestations to the contrary from his tiresomely conservative buddy are not about to dissuade him. Aware of Mike’s ‘on the wagon’ status, Jim orchestrates a liquor stop and the two are soon ruminating as to where something a little stronger might be procured. Needless to say, violent confrontations are only around the corner. The white male machismo, and its inability to cope with various pressures, has proved to be a fertile seam, which many directors have tapped to greater and lesser degrees of success, and ‘Harsh Times’ has as its antecedents films such as ‘Falling Down.’ But Ayer’s film promises more than it delivers, the prospect of an explosive outburst remains ever-present, but too often the director allows the tension to dissipate in favour of another round of verbal sparring and buddy-speak. When the pay off eventually comes, we’ve been waiting too long and it appears fatuous and overblown. This strangely weighted structure – 90% build-up and 10% payoff – has a wearying effect on the viewer making it difficult to care by the conclusion. Bale is clearly immersed in his role, intense as he’s ever been, but we never really see things from his perspective (Mike is our moral compass throughout), and as a result ‘Harsh Times’ never attains the power of the Scorsese movies it seeks to emulate. – David O Mahony
‘Harsh Times’ opens nationwide on Friday 18th August, certified 16. www.harshtimes.com
THE ANT BULLY After a particularly callous attack (flooding the ants’ colony with a water pistol), Lucas’ insensitive ways come a cropper after vengeful ant wizard Zoc (Nicholas Cage, whose voice alone instantly conjures up images of wild gesticulations and erratic facial tics) shrinks him down to ant-size. Sentenced by the ethereal ant-queen (Meryl Streep) to toil in the colony until he learns “the true meaning of being an ant”, Lucas becomes friends with nurse ant Hova (Julia Roberts) until, to no-one’s great surprise, he discovers the, ahem, true meaning of being an ant. Ignoring the syrupy clichés that bookend the film, ‘The Ant Bully’ works best when it makes the most of the microcosmic otherworldliness of the environment (a series of running battles with wasps that doesn’t feel a million miles a away from the war sequences from the end of ‘Star Wars: Attack of the Clones’) or when it plays around with ideas of scale (a firecracker explodes like an atom bomb, only for the view to cut to a wide shot of the lawn, the destruction reduced to a mere ‘poof’ of smoke). But these little gems are few and far between, the story preferring to go the tried and trusted path of “learn to be yourself” or some-such guff. In this manner, ‘The Ant Bully’ will probably have your family leaving the cinema with varying feelings of dissatisfaction. Children will wish they’d gone to see ‘Cars’ and adults bemoaning that they didn’t bring the little buggers to the later screening of ‘Monster House’. - Jamie Hannigan
‘The Ant Bully’ opened nationwide on Friday 4th August, certified G. www.theantbully.com
WILDERNESS Michael J. Bassett, who directed ‘Death Watch’ in 2002 (featuring a pre-Gollum Andy Serkis), revisits that earlier film’s tough British guys out of their element and in peril premise with another hackneyed plot which borrows liberally from countless other horror/action movies, such as ‘First Blood,’ ‘Predator,’ and ‘The Descent,’ to name but a few. The film focuses on a group of reform school ruffians forced by their superiors into spending time on a remote island in an attempt to engender in them responsibility and respect for their fellow man following the suicide of a much-bullied member of their unit. In a device common to such films, we see the action through the eyes of a newcomer to the group, Callum (Toby Kebbell, who previously played Paddy Considine’s slightly retarded brother in Shane Meadow’s magnificent ‘Dead Man’s Shoes). Jettisoning character development in favour of stereotypes, Bassett orchestrates a situation whereby the boys are remorselessly hunted down by an unseen assailant, and one-by-one they are gutted, shot, knifed, or gored to death by the ‘predator’s’ trusty Alsatians. With not the briefest wink to subtlety, the director engineers eviscerations of such spectacular brutality, they become scenes of unintentional humour rather than shock. Indeed, the violence seems to be used as a clumsy means to distract us from asking pertinent questions about the plot, which unravels to a final-reel revelation of knee-trembling preposterousness, as though Bassett were saying to us, ‘oh, don’t worry about that, here’s a man having his leg cut off by a bear-trap.’ – David O Mahony
‘Wilderness’ opens exclusively at Cineworld on Friday 11th August, certified 18. www.momentumpictures.co.uk |
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