Film Reviews by Kurtz

This film is perfectly OK in that it has a nice script with a few Seinfeldisms and an amusing turn from a self-mocking Ray Liotta to keep the adults happy: it looks fabulous with a golden colour palette and the animators have lots of fun with the movements and flight of the bees. But the central concept- young bee pitches up in the big (human) city, strikes up a friendship with Renee Zellweger’s fetching florist and begins a lawsuit against mankind when he realises that we are helping ourselves to his honey- is desperately lazy; I mean surely that’s a central rule for all these types of films- “A Bug’s Life”, “Antz”, “Toy Story”, even “Lady and the Tramp”- the characters can show awareness of the human world but can never properly interact with it because they can’t talk! But in “Bee Movie” we’re soon being asked to swallow (and somebody nearly does) bee lawyers in a human courtroom, bee reporters at a human press conference, bees being treated in human hospitals, bees flying airliners etc. etc. Grrr! I was itching for a rolled up newspaper by the end! My twelve year old said it made perfect sense to her, though- maybe it’s just me they’re not talking to!

This is an oddball thriller starring a young Owen Wilson as a serial killer who uses the minimum of force and prefers his victims to “simply go to sleep”. Straight away, then, the scares and tension linked with your standard serial killer movie are sacrificed, and you are left with more time to watch Wilson’s cheerful, considerate demeanour and ponder his motivation for these acts. You get plenty of the former as he charms his way around town, but very little insight into the latter as his hits get increasingly random (the stuff in the publicity material about “putting people out of their misery” simply doesn’t hold up) and his explanations ever vaguer.

A relic of the drive-in cinema age, released in 1962 by a director who had up until then majored in health education films, “Carnival of Souls” is interesting nowadays only as an indicator of how far film-making and acting has come since the early sixties, and as a blueprint for the “caught-between -two –worlds” type thrillers like “Jacob’s Ladder”and “The Sixth Sense”.Other aspects have dated horribly, the stilted acting and the leaden dialogue, particularly in the less “intense” scenes, proving particularly hard to forgive. When things start to unravel for our heroine, there is admiiedly a vaguely spooky feel and the “Carnival” of the title is not somewhere you’d like to wander at night, but eye-rolling close-ups of lead actress Candace Hilligoss have you wriggling more in embarrassment than fear.

That’ll teach me to read the film academic’s “Screen Notes” in the DVD extras- apparently this is all about the pain of artistic creation and “the unrequited love between a lighthouse and a hole in the ground”…Funny, because I thought it was all about a horny writer, his rampant imagination and his uninhibited and agile lovers (who may or may not be all in his head)…Tremendous fun anyway. Not a clue what’s going on half the time, but just sit back and enjoy the rides(s)!!

Yes, Christian Bale does damaged and dangerous again, but this offering doesn’t have an ounce of the dark humour (or diverting sex scenes) of “American Psycho”. Here, it’s all deadly serious, but after twenty minutes in the company of Bale’s character Jim and his adoring mate Mike, played by Freddy Rodriguez, you really start to weary of the constant fist-tapping and shouts of “Homeee!” None of this mateyness can conceal the fact that Bale’s Jim is a vicious bully and Mike is too spineless to make the break; even the long-suffering female characters do little to shake things up, obligingly tattooing themselves with their boyfriends’ names like primary school pencil cases and cooing such immortal feminist lines as “I would be happy to be killed by the man I love”. Most chilling is the fact that the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security offer Jim a job, claiming he’s “just what they are looking for”- sure, put a big gun in his hand and we can all sleep easier in our beds.

This was great fun- eighteen five minute tales by internationally acclaimed directors set in the self-proclaimed “City of Love,” all based in different areas of Paris and all dealing, sometimes ironically, sometimes reverentially, with the theme of love. There are dozens of famous actors to spot and Paris provides a wonderful range of backdrops, from the great to the grotty. Even if the odd segment drags a bit – the first one’s a bit of a non-event and the mimes left me cold- there’s always something fresh, funny and thought-provoking coming up next. My find of the year!

“Night of the Sunflowers” is an absorbing drama about a shocking crime and the effect that it has on a tiny community in a disappearing rural Spain. It has a singular structure, following each of its characters in turn into the moral maze as they struggle to deal with the consequences of an attempted rape, and casting them adrift as they succumb to the temptations of revenge and corruption. This rather unnatural narrative device can be a little frustrating at times as we are introduced to character after character who we know to be destined for ultimate misery, but it’s well acted and the director has clearly stuck to his guns and resisted the temptation of a neat Hollywood-style finish.

Early sighting of Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem both up to their shapely necks in lust and dirty dealing. Cruz gets to run around in the rain and be ardently wooed by most of the men in the cast (no change there, then), whilst the director leaves little to the imagination in his portrayal of Bardem as the local stud (nude bullfighting, anyone??) Bed-hopping, jealous rage, oedipal moments, a parrot voyeur and a suicidal piglet, you name it, it’s all there. There are a number of surreally comic moments, e.g. a fight to the death with a leg of ham, but we’re well into melodrama territory even before the OTT final tableau.

“Brick Lane” is a fair attempt at bringing Monica Ali’s brilliant, sprawling novel to the screen; at its heart is the heroine’s efforts to make sense of her life as she is uprooted from rural Bangladesh and plonked into an arranged marriage to an older man in a grim East London tower block. In the novel, Ali is able to make use of numerous sub-plots to broaden the canvas, while the film concentrates almost exclusively on the marriage of Nazneem and her blowhard husband Chanu, which leaves us, like Nazneem, stuck in her flat most of the time watching the world go by. There are good performances all round in the film, but it only provides a hint of the delights that the novel offers.

I found this quite enjoyable- Jamie Bell is in fine spiky form as the bereaved “hero” who is at war with the world after the death of his mother. His Hallam seems to carry the world on his shoulders, and his twisted posture and feisty attitude hint at his inner torment- quite a surprise, then, that he manages to pull off trysts with not one but two glamorous women (one admittedly a bit close to home!). Despite the unlikelihood of this, though, it’s a fresh and bracing addition to the anguished-teen-learning-about-life genre, and the rooftops of Edinburgh make a great setting for Hallam’s adventures.

“R-Point” is a standard “lost platoon” story with a mis-matched band of South Korean soldiers dispatched into the Vietnamese wilderness to track down a patrol of their compatriots who everyone believes to have been wiped out, but who appear able to send spooky radio messages to their base. These messages and occasional appearances from the ghost soldiers are the most effective features of the movie, but the director eventually settles for depicting the descent of the search party into madness and their own personal hell, and this involves a lot of goggling into the middle distance at unseen horrors, and unhinged reactions without satisfactory explanations, rather like the Sunday night TV series that has been entertaining and frustrating us for the last three years.

The blurb says “a plea for peace”, but giving one of the would-be bombers an articulate five minute speech towards the end of the movie on why he wants to go through with the plan is a risky strategy at least given the number of impressionable types out there. The film is chilling in its depiction of the preparation of the bombers- the rituals, the “martyr videos” and the icy calm that descends on the pair as they get close to their mission. The director tries to be even-handed; not only does he make clear the indignities of life on the occupied West Bank, the checkpoints, the arbitrary road closures and the constant presence of heavily armed soldiers, but he also shows the warmth of family life that the bombers are sacrificing for paradise and a piece of bloody history.

Despite the rush you get from seeing indie kings Dandy Warhols make the big time before your very eyes in this film, it’s Anton Newcombe, frontman of Brian Jonestown Massacre, who represents the artistic heart of the movie. It is put together from seven years spent with the bands, filming them in performance, in conversation, in conflict and occasionally in trouble with the law. Newcombe produces heady sixties-inspired music and a mesmerising stage presence, but his talent has to battle against his self-destructive nature, be it in the form of drug abuse or his penchant for an on-stage punch-up (both unflinchingly shown here.) It’s immensely watchable and an awesome labour of love by director Timoner.

Unremittingly glum tale of a glum French farmer and his glum mates who glumly go off to fight in an unnamed war (probably one of the Gulf conflicts, judging by the burning oil wells on the skyline.) Here they don’t encounter the enemy but manage to lose their commanding officer and then embark on an ill-advised revenge mission that royally hacks off the locals. The survivors end up back on their glum French farms, where they continue to be glum. Director Dumont says he prefers to work with non-professional actors, and his direction to these people is “do nothing” so all the script is delivered in a flat monotone and no-one ever reacts to what’s going on. Very hard to like.

I liked this film although it was only partially successful in merging the two distinct storylines. Whilst the camera lingers predictably on the Winslet/Wilson affair, the more compelling story is that of the community's treatment of Jackie Earle Haley's sex offender, who is living with his doting mother having served his prison sentence.

Todd Solondz did a much more satisfying hatchet job on the lives and mores of the same middle-class America in "Happiness", and "Little Children", though entertaining enough in its own right, suffers by comparison with that work of genius as it purports to say the same things but ultimately lacks the courage of its convictions.