MILLION DOLLAR ARM

MILLION DOLLAR ARM is a straight forward no-nonsense sports under-dog story imbued with all the earnest good intentions and feel-good loveliness that a Disney movie entails. It's based on the true story of baseball pitchers Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel who were discovered by sports agent J.B. Bernstein after winning a reality show competition and went on to become the first Indians to play major-league baseball.

The conventional character development arc lands on Jon Hamm as the sleazy hard-up lothario and agent JB.  He initiates the completion as a means to revive his career and has no interest in his putative stars other than the commissions and new clients they can win him.  Naturally, India is a transformative experience - particularly a visit to the boys rural village.  It's a cliche that I find as insulting now as I did when I watched THE DARJEELING LIMITED.  But not content with one movie cliche, the film introduces another, when JB falls for his kind-hearted no-nonsense tenant - a doctor played by the ever-authentic Lake Bell.  She brings the most out of a two-dimensional character and softens both JB's heart and ours.

The obvious things happen. There are high pressure try-outs that are fumbled and second chances at redemption.  The mean nasty businessman has a heart of gold and all things can be cured by the love of a good woman and a visit to a third world country. 

All of which is highly disappointing given the quality of the cast - not least  the Indian actor Pitobash - and the director Craig Gillespie (LARS AND THE REAL GIRL) and writer Tom McCarthy (UP). If Disney had been willing to make the film a little grittier, and JB a little less likeable, they could have done something really memorable. 

MILLION DOLLAR ARM has a running time of 124 minutes and is rated PG.  The movie was released earlier this year in India, Canada, the USA, Cambodia, Pakistan, Argentina, Greece, Chile, Turkey, Mexico and Peru.  It opens this weekend in the UK and Ireland.  It opens in September in Italy, Panama, Colombia, Germany, Denmark, South Africa and Brazil. It opens in October in Japan, Spain and Norway, in Hungary on December 1st and in Sweden on March 11th 2015. 

FATELESS/SORSTALANSAG - one of the more sensitive treatments of the Holocaust

FATELESS is an outstanding feature film about the Holocaust. It is based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Nobel-prize-winning Hungarian author Imre Kersetz. He adapted the work for the screen himself and is responsible for a structure that some could find boring or unengaging. Instead of telling the story through flash-backs, or spicing up the narrative with melodramatic events, Kersetz keeps the story linear and simple. Over two hours we follow a fourteen year old Hungarian boy called György Köves. His father is sent to a labour camp and he is forced to work in a brick factory. One day he is rounded up by a kindly looking policeman and packed onto a train to Auschwitz-Birkenau. At every stage he is given small precious words of advice. He is told the German for "sixteen" so that he get himself out of Auschwitz and into a labour camp. There he grinds out the rest of the war. His tragedy is to have been born into an evil time and his punishment is to have to serve that time. To mark it, standing in a wet field all day until fainting from hunger.

This is what Kersetz wants to tell us. That there are no sweeping epic moments or emotional flights. There is dull perseverance and hatred. These are shown in tableaux form, one following the other with a kind of harrowing monotony. The impact is greater thanks to a universally good cast, a discreet score and some outstanding photography. Lajos Koltai may be a first-time director but he is a celebrated cinematographer and comes up with the ingenious method of slowly fading the movie from full colour in Budapest to sepia tints in the train to stark black and white as we reach the final camp. The changing colour is so slow you almost miss it, but hits you powerfully toward the end. It mirrors the slow change from little boy to ghost. Even when the camp in which György Köves is held is liberated and he returns to Budapest the film is still in black and white as if to signify that there can be no real return..

FATELESS is a profoundly painful and depressing film. The title itself refers to György Köves feeling that it is better to believe in nothing and to have no fate than to be a believing Jew who accepts the Holocaust as part of his fate of perpetual suffering. Every scene feels authentic, no doubt because Kersetz personally over-saw small details of the production design. I feel it is compulsary viewing in the same way as THE SORROW AND THE PITY and NIGHT AND FOG are compulsary viewing.

As an aside, I originally saw the movie back in January and recently watched the DVD for the first time - forcing it onto Doctor007 in the manner of a low-rent Woody Allen flick. I don't normally comment on DVD extras, but the DVD is well worth viewing because it contains an interview with Imre Kersetz in which he discusses why the film had to be structured as it was. But most interesting is his rant at the expense of Steven Spielberg's SCHINDLER'S LIST. I have always found SCHINDLER'S LIST to be problematic. Everything seemed so heavy-handed and emotionally manipulative. And finally, so optimistic! There is an anecdote I heard - I have no idea whether it is true - that Spielberg showed Kubrick a cut of Schindler's List eager for praise. Kubrick apparently told Spielberg that he had entirely missed the point: "The Holocaust was about 6 million Jews who were murdered. You chose to tell a story about 100 who were saved." Kersetz delivers one of the most articulate and scathing critiques of Schindler's List in his interview. He calls it inauthentic in its historical detail and imagined situations. But this is the least of its problems, according to Kersetz. The greatest charge is that it finds humanity in hell. You don't have to agree with him but it is fascinating to hear his critique....

FATELESS opened in Hungary, Germany and France in 2005. It opened in New York and the UK earlier in 2006 and was released on DVD this week. It opens in Denmark on September 1st, the Netherlands on September 7th and in Belgium on October 25th.

BASIC INSTINCT 2 - My not-so-secret shame

So I found myself in the West End with a couple of hours to spare and I decided to check out BASIC INSTINCT 2. My motives were pretty miserable: curiousity and a sort of malevolent will to laugh at something bad. So, I slapped down my ten squid, armed myself with some happiness-inducing ice-cream and braced myself for the worst. Two hours later I left the theatre in a state of shock and shame - my entire worldview had been shaken - I had to admit to myself that I *really* enjoyed this movie. Which is, as far as I can tell, a minority view. When something like this happens you have to ask yourself: is the rest of the world completely wrong about BASIC INSTINCT 2 and/or was I smoking crack?

Well, as painful as it is, let's try and work out exactly why I think you too should go see BASIC INSTINCT 2 this weekend. BASIC INSTINCT 2 is an erotic thriller. And before you think that sounds sleazy, you have probably seen and enjoyed more erotic thrillers than you think: Fatal Attraction, Where The Truth Lies, Mulholland Drive, In The Cut....And this sequel is far less erotic and far more a thriller than the original. (I am not saying that this is a good or a bad thing, just noting it for the record.) There is far less explicit sexual content, no obligatory lesbian sex-scene. Indeed, most of the time, sex is hinted at, off-screen, or we just see the sordid consequences of it. In many ways, then, BASIC INSTINCT 2 has taken its relocation to London seriously, and while the content hints at dark-doings, these are no worse than your average British political sex-scandal. (And no, I am not *just* talking about the spoofing of the famous Christine Keeler photo.)

A big sales factor for me is that the movie is shot not just in generic London but in precisely the part of London in which I live. And London looks bloody brilliant: all hyper-modern blade-runner skyscrapers in Canary Wharf and the City contrasted with claustrophic Gothic trophy buildings. It captures everything that I love about this town - that you can walk through the medieval glory of the Tower of London and five minutes later amble by the Lloyds building. And Soho (which these days is rather a gentrified tourist trap) has never looked more like a page from an Alan Moore novel.

But anyways, on to the plot and performances. The plot is pretty similar to the original movie. Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) is a successful author of pulp fiction. Her novels involve sex, drugs, murder: "the basic instincts", and usually describe sleazy crimes that later just happen to occur. In the first five minutes of this movie she speeds off a road into the Thames while having sex with C-list British footballer, Stan Collymore, leaving him to die. This brings her to the attention of the local police, one of whom (David Thewlis) wants to bang her up (ho-ho) whether or not he has the evidence. Catherine is referred to the state's psychologist, Dr Michael Glass (David Morrissey). Glass diagnoses her as a "risk addict" whose own death will be the only final boundary to her reckless actions. He then takes Catherine on as a private patient. A tangled web of affairs and evil-doings unfold involving David's ex-wife, her lover - a tabloid journalist threatening to expose murky secrets in Dr Glass' past - and David's mentor, played by the ever-amazing Charlotte Rampling. As in the first Basic Instinct, as the murders pile up we ask whether Catherine really is a psychopath, or whether Dr Glass, or even the dirty cop, are committing them to save their respective assess.

So far, so good. The plot ticks all the right boxes. How about the execution? Like I said, director Michael Caton-Jones (who bizarrely has the diametrically opposite movie, SHOOTING DOGS in UK cinemas at the same time as this) creates the perfect backdrop in London. London shimmers and seduces in exactly the same way that Catherine should. And, to my mind, Sharon Stone really does pull it off - although I am a "gurl" so clearly am no judge compared to all those moronic guys on blogs posting that she is too old to play the part. Alls I know is that I cannot imagine anyone else acting this outrageously and looking completely authentic while they are doing it. I am less sure of David Thewlis as the dirty cop and David Townsend as Dr Glass. Thewlis goes for over-the-top hammy - presumably on the say-so of the director - and Townsend is little better than a foil. It would have been infinitely more satisfying had they cast a heavyweight actor - whether Yank or Brit. Someone like Clive Owen, I suspect, would have done better.

But finally, I think the film works on a basic level as a whodunnit. The two hours flew by as the bodies mounted up (hehehe) and the plot became more complex. Yes I know some of it is a bit silly, not least the Stan Collymore episode, but you have to admire any film-makers that understand that genre and revel in its possibilities. And I defy any audience not to enjoy the scene where Catherine immitates Christine Keeler, gets Dr Glass hot, and then announces, "I think our time is up, Doctor!" That was one of the many INTENDED laughs that this film got.

So there we are. I really liked this film. What's next? I develop a taste for Jennifer Aniston rom-coms?

BASIC INSTINCT 2: RISK ADDICTION is on global release.