WONDER WOMAN

Beating an admittedly low bar, WONDER WOMAN is unquestionably the best movie in the DC franchise. It has some of the darkness of BATMAN VS SUPERMAN but never feels pretentious or portentous; and in the place of SUICIDE SQUADS' maddeningly shifting tone and offensive objectification of Harley Quinn we have a movie with a straightforward compelling story and a courageous and often subtle take on modern sexual and racial politics.  The result is a film that's both highly enjoyable and yet deeply meaningful  - a long overdue strong heroine in a universe full of macho posturers. 

The movie opens in contemporary France with Batman reaching out to Diana/Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), but it's essentially a long flashback and origins story, told in live action and with beautifully designed animation and the most seamless use of CGI.  We see the young child growing up on an island of Amazonian woman - fierce warriors created by Zeus to protect humanity from the corrupting influence of his son Aries, the god of war.  Diana herself is moulded from clay by her mother Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen - GLADIATOR), and made live by Zeus himself. Accordingly, she is herself a god, sister to Aries, although this fact seems to escape her logical notice.  The Amazons have been holed up on a magical island while World War One is raging around them, until US spy Steve Trevor (Chris Pine - STAR TREK reboot) crash lands in their midst.  A brave Diana then returns with him to wartime Europe, supposedly to bring an end to war by killing Aries, whom she believes is German General Ludendorff (Danny Huston.)

EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS

Listen to a ten-minute podcast review of the film here:

EXODUS: GOD AND KINGS isn't a good or a bad film but rather a collection of films that may or may not hang together as a sweeping biblical epic of the Charlton Heston kind.  It's long, uneven in pace, and takes too few chances to be really memorable. 

In its first act the movie feels like GLADIATOR.  The dying king is transposed from a Roman emperor to a Pharaoh played with surprising majesty by John Turturro. His jealous, power-hungry and paranoid son is transposed from Joaquin Phoenix to a shaven-headed and bejewelled Joel Edgerton.  And the rival for power who will lead a down-trodden people to freedom is transposed from Russell Crowe to Christian Bale.   This section is the most satisfying of the film - literally awesome in its lavish costumes, Egyptian cityscapes, jewels and vistas.  It feels like an old-fashioned big-budget epic of imperial power-politics, pitting two alpha males against each other.  Ben Mendelsohn is superb as the effete toady who reveals Moses' Jewish origin to both Moses and Ramses and I love the genuine conflict as Moses struggles to come to terms with his true identity. The only sadness was seeing Sigourney Weaver as Ramses mother use an anachronistic broad American accent and then become sidelined for the rest of the film.

London Film Fest 2012 Day 12 - GREAT EXPECTATIONS (2012)

Charles Dickens' superlative novel, Great Expectations, has been adapted many times for the small and large screen.  The first theatrical outing was in 1917, the most recent TV adaptation last year, with a notable contemporary version by Alfonso Cuaron starring Gwyneth Paltrow as Estella and Anne Bancroft as the Miss Havisham character. My personal favourite is the TV movie from 1999 directed by Julian Jarrold (BRIDESHEAD REVISITED), with Ioan Gruffud as Pip, Justine Waddell as Estella, and an absolutely definitive Charlotte Rampling as Miss Havisham.  Given the rich canon of work, a high bar should be set for any new production.  One should ask what this particular interpretation is going to do anything that is new and insightful.  Surely it isn't enough just to create another film simply because it has been five years since the last one, and there's a nice commercial tie-in with the Dickens bicentenary.  Sadly, I suspect that's exactly the motivation for Mike Newell's new version of the novel. And I can't say it surprises me.  His career looks very much like one of a moderately talented director for hire, without any clear over-riding style or thematic consistency.  How else dos one explain credits that vary from DONNIE BRASCO to HARRY POTTER & THE GOBLET OF FIRE to PRINCE OF PERSIA: SANDS OF TIME?

That said, a cursory look at the production notes suggested a movie that could be something very special indeed. Given her personal Gothic style and amazing talent, one might have thought Helena Bonham Carter born to play Miss Havisham - the rich, capricious, vengeful woman who raises her adopted Estella to be a cold-hearted temptress and so have her revenge on men. Holliday Grainger, so impressive as Lucrezia in TV's The Borgias, would not have far to go in depicting the tragically emotionally blighted Estella. Jeremy Irvine, the likeable boy at the heart of WAR HORSE, would make a touching Pip - the young working class lad whose head is turned by an inheritance and his love for Estella.  And the rest of the cast is a who's who of British talent, starting with Ralph Fiennes - so sinister as Heathcliff - as Magwitch, the convict whose life is entwined with that of Pip - Robbie Coltrane as the ruthless lawyer Jaggers and Jason Flemyng as the kind-hearted blacksmith Joe Gargery.  I was quite ready to believe that a half faithful script and half decent production design would allow these actors to create a GREAT EXPECTATIONS that was both Gothic and sinister as well as heartbreaking: the tale of a young boy corrupted by wealth and redeemed by love, and of the corrosive impact of secrets.

On one level, the movie is a success.  The story of Magwitch and his unlikely friendship with Pip - his life mangled by the Justice system, and redeemed by his recognition of a kindly act - is given almost half of the screentime, and Ralph Fiennes really is marvellous.  I'm not sure that Jeremy Irvine matches him, but that would be a tall order indeed.  The story of Pip and his friend Joe, so bound up in the start and end of the story, is also given room to breathe, and I believe that this role is Jason Flemyng's finest and that he is also the best Joe Gargery I've seen on screen.  The problem is with the Satis House storyline.  I'm not quite sure why but Helena Bonham Carter's performance just falls flat. She is neither sinister nor tragic.  Poor Estella gets very little screentime indeed, and her marriage to the brutal Bentley Drummle is rather thrown away.  Does the audience unfamiliar with the novel realise that he has beaten her into submission? Poor Herbert Pocket gets very little screentime, although both Olly Alexander as older Herbert, and Charlie Callaghan as Young Herbert are scene stealers.

Overall, then, a rather flat, imbalanced movie in which the Magwitch storyline is creditably done and Satis House isn't. And as Satis House is what this novel is ultimately remembered for, that is a fatal flaw indeed.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS played Toronto 2012 and will be released in the UK and Ireland on November 30th 2012.  It opens in Germany on December 6th; in Russia on January 24th 2013 and in New Zealand on March 7th.

Guy Ritchie retrospective - SNATCH

SNATCH follows the exact-same formula as LOCK, STOCK except that this time, the world of underground gambling and narcotics has been replaced with diamond-smuggling and under-ground boxing. The visual style is similar - flashy editing, video-game manipulation of action and the all-knowing mockney voice-over, this time from our protagonist Turkish (Jason Statham). To that extent, SNATCH is doomed to be less satisfying than LOCK, STOCK because it's less of a surprise.

On the other hand, I do really like SNATCH because it's even less compromising than LOCK, STOCK. Accents are thicker, and in the case of Brad Pitt's charver, deliberately impenetrable. The violence is harsher - including an arson attack and a particularly nasty form of dispatching errant crooks. The humour is darker, the double-crossing is nastier, the sets are grimier and the language is filthier. Despite the Tarantino-like comedy anecdotes, Alan Ford is genuinely menacing as the evil gangster Brick Top, and unlike LOCK, STOCK, there are several scenes of genuine peril. The most memorable of these is a scene where footage of hare-coursing is inter-cut with footage of a small-time burglar getting nabbed by Brick-top's men. It's outstandingly well put-together. Similarly, the boxing scenes are really well shot, even if they take heavy inspiration from RAGING BULL.

My over-riding feeling after watching SNATCH was that this was a holding picture. Ritchie was still in his comfort zone regarding characters and settings but had become a lot more accomplished technically. He was set up nicely for a third film. That was until he took a left-turn into Kabbalah and up himself with SWEPT AWAY and REVOLVER.

SNATCH was released in 2000 and is available on DVD.

DEATH AT A FUNERAL - monumentally unfunny

DEATH AT A FUNERAL is a British farce blessed with a good director (Frank Oz) and a hansome cast of British actors - from Rupert Graves to Kris Marshall to Daisy Donovan. These are people we KNOW can be funny. Frank Oz is a funny man. Kris Marshall is a funny man. Daisy Donovan had her own comedy show, for heaven's sake. And yet the resulting ninety minute film is monumentally unfunny. I mean, I was sitting in the cinema, bored and unsmiling, thinking how much of an achievement it was to make a film in which Kris Marshall and Daisy Donovan are just NOT funny. Stupendous. Miraculous, even? Certainly, something which suggests a malevolent deliberateness rather than unfortunate cack-handedness. Screen-writer needs to go and stand in the corner and think very carefully about what he's done. This is arguably the worst film I have seen in the year to date.

DEATH AT A FUNERAL was released in Belgium, Israel, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, Finland, Norway, Italy, Denmark, France, Portugal, Sweden, Singapore, Brazil, Australia, Russia, Spain and Greece earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK and opens in Hungary on November 22nd.

HALLAM FOE - a puzzling little film

HALLAM FOE is an odd, puzzling film and I'm not convinced it added up to much in the end. However, cinephiles will want to see it for Jamie Bell's brave central performance as the eponymous troubled teen.

Hallam is a seventeen year-old boy who is convinced that his mother's suicide was engineered by his step-mother (Claire Forlani with a perfect English accent.) Since the death, Hallam has retreated into his tree-house, snooping on people from afar and nurturing his paranoid delusions. Confronted by the (apparently) Macchiavellian step-mother, Hallam flees to Edinburgh. There, he takes a menial job in a hotel in order to get close to a young woman (Sophia Myles) who happens to look like his dead mother.

The movie is strong on performances and the look is suitably sinister and grim. Hallam comes across as conflicted and borderline insane - but also as charming and warm. I really cared about what happened to him. This is in sharp contrast to writer-director, David Mackenzie's, earlier film, YOUNG ADAM, which I found to be irredeemably bleak and alienating.

Where this film lost me was in the writing. The motivations of key characters seemed a bit random or insufficiently fleshed out. I never got a grip on what the dad (Ciaran Hinds) was up to for a start. And the Sophia Myles character was bizarre - in a good way I think - because instead of running screaming at the idea of having dated her stalker she actually embraces his weirdness. It's a strangely optimistic thought. Apart from all these substantive issues, some of the scenes just don't work. There's a particularly excruciating pre-coital scene in a hotel suite between Hallam and his girlfriend, for instance.

Still, it's another great performance from Jamie Bell and proves that he is maturing into an interesting actor who is willing to take on challenging roles.

HALLAM FOE played Berlin, where it won the Silver Bear, and Edinburgh 2007 and is currently on release in the UK and Germany. It opens in Swizterland on October 4th, in Belgium on October 24th and in the Netherlands on January 17th 2008.