WICKED FOR GOOD**

WICKED FOR GOOD is the second part of John M. Chu's adaptation of the wildly successful Broadway musical. The action takes place a year after the first part. The genuinely magical Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) has scorned the fraudulent Wizard's offer to share power and is desperately trying to expose his lies.  Meanwhile, her childhood best friend Glinda (Ariana Grande) has fallen in with Madam Morrible's plans for propaganda against Elphaba, while still hoping to broker a reconciliation. Glinda remains in love with the dashingly handsome Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), and Nessarose (Marissa Bode) remains in love with Bok (Ethan Slater). Let's just say that Glinda takes romantic disappointment with more elegance than Nessa.

The problem with splitting the musical into two is that the first half contains the stronger music and all the fun.  This latter half is an almost uninterrupted downer. Oz is descending into authoritarianism policed by flying monkeys.  Almost everybody is romantically disappointed.  Worst of all, we so rarely see Glinda and Elphaba together on screen.  Whenever we do, the movie springs to life, grounded in their love for each other. The only genuine laugh of the film happens when they fight 90 minutes in. The only tears that threaten are when they sing of how the other has changed them "for good" in the final act.  When the film centres their story, and unites them, it is an altogether more engaging beast.  But when they are apart, boy, is it dull and dispiriting. Does anyone really care about Nessa and Bok, or catch any kind of romantic spark between Fiyero and Elphie? As for the Wizard and Morrible, while Jeff Goldblum is having fun indulging himself, I doubt anyone else is amused. And as badass as Michelle Yeoh is, she cannot sing.

So we twist the gears to our finale. If the first film was really Elphie's journey to self-actualisation and belief then this film is Glinda's.  I loved her arc, and the new song about a spoiled girl whose bubble probably should be popped was both beautiful and meaningful. And of course the whole thing is a technical marvel - beautifully costumed and designed.  But I continue to believe that it would have been better as one film with fewer songs and a more complete and balanced narrative arc. 

WICKED FOR GOOD is rated PG and has a running time of 138 minutes. It will be released on November 21st. 

WICKED: PART I***

I came to WICKED: PART I cold. I had not seen the musical, heard any of the songs, and was unspoiled as to plot.  Here is what I discovered:

The movie is Act One of a two act musical that serves as a prequel to THE WIZARD OF OZ.  It begins with the death of the Wicked Witch of the West as announced by the Glinda the Good Witch and then takes us back to their teenage friendship at the unfortunately named Shiz University.  

We learn that the Wicked Witch was actually a thoughtful, earnest, sensitive girl called Elphaba who had been spurned by society because of her green skin and her frighteningly uncontrollable actual magic powers. She dreamed of meeting the Wizard of Oz so that he could grant her a wish.  As Galinda soon realises, that wish is to get rid of her green skin, because as much as Elphaba pretends not to care what people think about her, of course she does.  Thanks to a mix-up, the two teenagers become best friends.  Galinda begins to discover her conscience just as Elphaba discovers that she has a crush on Galinda's dashing and apparently superficial boyfriend Fiyero. They bond over their shared horror at the persecution of animals, who have hitherto lived side-by-side with humans in a Bojack Horseman style world. The film culminates in the girls finally arriving in the Emerald City to meet the Wizard and asking for her heart's desire....

Let's start with the negatives. First of all, the music is not to my taste. The vast majority is derivative, mediocre and eminently skippable. The exceptions are the songs Popular and Defying Gravity, but that's thin gruel for a two hour, forty minute running time. Second of all, the themes of the musical are obvious, ham-fisted and trite.  I feel that I have seen a bazillion movies about how the uniquely talented but superficially different people are excluded and mocked only to use their power for vengeance. X-MEN anyone?  And oh the delicious irony of a film so very inclusive that refuses to cast even one little person as a munchkin.  Third, the plot is just so blatantly obvious. I guessed the plot twist concerning the Wizard and the plot twist concerning Fiyero while watching Act One, and googled post-film to confirm my guesses.

Still, there's a lot to love too, and on the whole I did enjoy watching the film.  The production and costume design are exceptionally good, and I loved the steampunk aesthetic of the world.  Ariana Grande is hilarious as Galinda and Cynthia Erivo (HARRIET) is heartbreaking as Elphaba, and on the rare occasions when they sing together it's just so perfectly harmonious it's joyous. The two actresses evidently fell in love with each other during filming and that reads on screen. When they share a moment on a dance floor it brings tears to our eyes.  They are the reason why the running time flies by so fast and why - despite the largely mediocre score and unsubtle politics - the film is memorable.

WICKED: PART I is rated PG and has a running time of 160 minutes. It is on global release.

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE*

I first tried to watch this film last year and gave up after 20 minutes. When it won a bunch of Golden Globes I tried again and it made it through an hour twenty.  I wasn't going to go back but a friend said there was this amazing speech by Ke Huy Quan that was SO moving so I watched again to the end. Alls I can say is that I'm really happy Ke Huy Quan is finally getting work again and that Michelle Yeoh is finally getting recognition as a serious actress. And I'm super glad the "two Dans" - who directed and wrote this movie really love sci-fi and meta verse films and Kubrick. But this film is a mess. A really boring, bullshit mess and I do NOT get the hype.  

Somewhere in it's bloated running time there is  touching story about a middle-aged woman who runs a laundrette and is trying to file her taxes. She is trying to reconcile herself to her life choices, and trying to rescue her daughter from depression, and trying to rediscover her love for her husband, and indeed herself.  THAT would be a worthwhile film. We rarely see such stories of middle-aged women, let alone Asian women.  But this film is so crowded with juvenile humour and what-if scenarios in alternative universes that the actual deep emotion is undercut.  I can't FEEL if I'm being distracted by Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis with hot dog fingers. Maybe that's on me. 

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE has a running time of 139 minutes and is rated R. It played SXSW 2022 and is on release globally.

FAR NORTH - like all the best fairy-tales, bestial and grimm

FAR NORTH is best viewed as grim(m) fairy tale and like all the best fairy tales it's full of sexual tension and menace and speaks to how narcissistic and selfish lovers can be.

In a un-named tundra in an ambiguous time, Saiva and Anja eke out a living. Saiva is mother and father to Anja, and loves her with an intensity that borders on the psychosexual. A near-dead man wanders into their path and Saiva, against her better instincts, takes him in. Immediately, he alters the balance of power: it is Loki that combs Anja's hair and hunts the reindeer; Loki who makes Anja laugh. Saiva suppresses her discomfort at first, tactfully leaving the two lovers alone, until they voice their desire to leave.

Michelle Yeoh is desperately moving as Saiva, putting so much emotion into a tortured glance that it's almost unbearable. Sean Bean is also convincing and nuanced as Loki - humble and grateful at the start; increasingly dominant and literally cocksure; finally brutally selfish. Michelle Krusiec is less convincing as Anja, but this isn't too damaging to a film that uses her merely as a possession to be fought over by Saiva and Loki. The movie has an austere, strange feel - deliberately cultivated with the ambiguity of the setting, the stunning spare ice-scapes, the minimal dialogue and the solemn iconography. I found it compelling....for the most part.

Spoilers.

The only problem I have with this film is the ending. Of course, Saiva was going to kill Anja and/or Loki. The foreshadowing was as subtle as a sledgehammer - she spent the entire movie sharpening her knife and skinning animals. The surprise was that she made Loki fuck her and said that she loved him. On my reading of the previous eighty minutes, she didn't love Loki but Anja. Killing Anja to keep her from leaving made sense. All that followed was pure nonsense.

FAR NORTH played Venice and London 2007 and was released in London and Russia last year.

Bina007's Danny Dyer Memorial List of the Ten Most Piss-Poor Flicks of 2008

Just in case you'd thought I'd gone soft, we return to bitter invective with this year's Trashcan of Shame. To find each nugget of Cinema Redemption your humble servant must crawl through a veritable sewer of lazy, formulaic, badly produced, stinky bilge. Here are the worst of the many offenders, conforming to the usual mix of shameless cash-in genre flicks; politically offensive exploitation flicks and auteurs gone awry.

THE SHAMELESS CASH-INS GENRE FLICKS.

1. P.S. I LOVE YOU. Hilary Swank attempts comedy. The film-makers mistakenly believe you can make a feel-good comedy out of bereavement. Mawkish. Unfunny. And what accent is Gerard Butler going for exactly?

2. MADE OF HONOR. Another offensively lazy, formulaic and charmless romantic comedy - all the more impressive for killing Michelle Monaghan and Patrick Dempsey's natural charm.

3=. 88 MINUTES and RIGHTEOUS KILL. Lo-rent "thrillers" in which Pacino and de Niro live off viewer nostalgia and clip their pension coupons. You know it's gone Pete Tong when Fiddy is far from the worst actor on screen.

HUMOURLESS EXPLOITATION FLICKS.

5. NEVER BACK DOWN. Like Karate Kid without the naive charm, NEVER BACK DOWN was basically misogynistic macho bullshit attracting the same sort of voyeurs who get kicks from happy slapping.

6. WANTED. Again with the misogynistic, macho bullshit. Bored viewers were left to ponder which was more ridiculous: James McAvoy affecting a six-pack or the Loom of Fate?

7. RAMBO. By far the most tragic entry in my trio of macho idiocy because as lurid as FIRST BLOOD was, it at least had a point. How are the mighty fallen.

8. BABYLON A.D. The existential angst of Vin Diesel vanishes in a puff of improbability. Mathieu Kassovitz flushes his art-house rep (LA HAINE) down the toilet with this star-vehicle sci-fi mish-mash. Even Michelle Yeoh as a kick-boxing nun can't save it.

AUTEURS GONE AWRY.

9. W. Liberal intellectuals wanted answers. Oliver Stone gave them a pastiche. 

10. AUSTRALIA. Baz Luhrmann promised us a knowing epic embracing romance, political injustice and war-time melodrama. He gave us a wooden, poorly edited, over-blown vanity project - a failure of monumental proportions.

BABYLON A.D. - All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing

Over-budget, over-schedule, unloved by its studio, disowned by its director, heavily edited down and released in two versions....BABYLON A.D. is a confused movie with a void at its centre, and I'm not talking about Vin Diesel. Writer-director Mathieu Kassovitz, who made the brilliant flick LA HAINE, has a done stitch-up job on the studio, accusing them of blocking his artistic vision with harsh editing. He's right. This dystopian thriller, based on the novel by Maurice G Dantec, has had its guts ripped out in the editing suite. The poor viewer never really has a clear idea about what the frack is going on.

My vague feeling is that a hundred years in the future, Russia has turned all of Europe and Asia into satelite states that have disintegrated into cyber-punk savagery. America is a locked-down haven of functionality but at a price - culture has been commercialised to the point where religion is sold through billboards like face-cream. Years ago, a mad scientist created a cylon baby who would have a virgin birth, propelling a particular sect to world domination. This baby, now a woman, is to be smuggled to the sect's headquarters in New York by a mercenary called Toorop and, for no particular reason other than sheer improbaility, a kung-fu nun.

The key point is this: the only bit of that plot summary that comes across coherently in the actual film is the final sentence. In other words, this movie is just one long chase scene for no particular reason. The only real pleasure is in observing the production design, which veers from a cool, gritty Kreuzberg like Europe, via Canadian snow-scapes, to a futuristic New York.

Mathieu Kassovitz claims that the studio hacked his film to death. I believe him. Still, that's only half the problem. The other half is the piss-poor casting. On the one hand you have Vin Diesel who, gods love him, can't really depict characters in the midst of moral dilemmas. And then you have Mélanie Thierry who plays the girl. Now, for the first hour of the film I swear to god I thought she was about fifteen. But then, in a really excruciatingly embarassing scene, her character comes on to the mercenary and you think, oh my god, she's actually meant to be in her twenties! I came home and looked up the actress' age on IMDB. She's actually 27!!! Amazing. Put it this way, you can cast her as your lead actress, but you need to put her opposite someone who looks like he could conceivably have a relationship with her without being accused of pederasty or indeed crushing her to death in the palm of his hand.

So all I'm saying is this. Kassovitz needs to come clean. Yes, the film is shit. Yes, the studio probably did bad things with FinalCut Pro. And maybe, just maybe, they forced Vin Diesel onto him. But he acquiesed. And then he cast an actress who looked 15 opposite him.....

BABYLON A.D. is on release in France, Belgium, Russia, Canada, the UL and the USA. It goes on release next weekend in Indonesia, Argentina, Portugal, Mexico and Panama. It opens on September 11th in Austria, Germany, Singapore and Brazil. It opens in Spain on September 19th. BABYLON A.D. opens in October in Australia, South Korea, Finland, Italy, Norway and Egypt and in November in Venezuela and Greece.

THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR - mindless fun, yay!

As I said in my review of HELLBOY II, the action-adventure romantic-comedy is one of the hardest genres to pull off. It demands a disciplined approach to plotting and the ability to keep the audience engaged in an emotional story despite all the whistles and bangs of the set-piece action sequences. In short, the director needs to be a master of technology, action, comedy and bring it all together in a coherent whole. When adventure movies work, they are about as much fun as you can have at the cinema. They exploit the scale and the group participation that you can only get with a packed house on opening night in a really big screen. I defy you to enjoy anything more than the opening night of HELLBOY II or, back in the day, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARC or THE GOONIES. INDIANA JONES 4 should've given us that thrill but it didn't.

THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR certainly isn't in the class of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and it owes those movies a debt of gratitude for set pieces in Shanghai and scenes at archeological digs. But THE MUMMY series, of which this is the best yet, certainly ticks all the right boxes for an entertaining, undemanding night out at the cinema. The movies have a lot of energy, exciting chase scenes and exotic locations, and for the most part roll along at a rapid pace throwing a good few laughs along the way.

In this episode, Rick and Evy are disgruntled with boring post-war married life, and take up the Foreign Office's offer to deliver a precious jewel to Shanghai. It turns out that the jewel will help resurrect an ancient Chinese emperor and his Terracotta Army - artefacts that Rick and Evy's son Alex just happens to have excavated. So follows much running, leaping, flying, wise-cracking and romancing.

The obvious glitches are the casting of a boy who looks way to old relative to his parents, and the fact that Maria Bello, fine actress though she is, being unable to pull off an English accent. It's also a bit frustrating to see Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh in a movie but no awesome martial arts sequences. However, this is more than compensated for by Brendan Fraser's trademark gusto, and John Hannah's ability to make cheesy lines like "My ass is on fire: spank my ass!" funny.

THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR is on release in Argentina, Chile, Hong Kong, Hungary, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, India, Mexico, Panama, Poland, Spain, Turkey, the USA, Venezuela, Egypt, France, Iceland, Indonesia and the UK. It opens this weekend in Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Pakistan, Romania, Sweden and Japan, It opens next weekend in Belgium, Croatia, Slovenia, Japan and Israel. The movie opens in September in Australia, Greece, New Zealand and Italy.

SUNSHINE - Utilitarianism 101

SUNSHINE is for the most part a beautifully designed but predictable sci-fi movie. Some time in a future imagined by Alex Garland (THE BEACH), mankind is about to freeze to death as the Sun burns out. A small crew of astronauts is sent to deliver a nuclear payload that will somehow cause the Sun to be reborn (there goes the Science!), thus saving all of mankind. But the Icharus never made it. And so, seven years later (biblical?!) another eight man crew is sent to nuke the sun in Icharus II. They comprise: Rose Byrne, Cliff Curtis (WHALE RIDER), Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans (FANTASTIC FOUR), Troy Garrity (MILWAUKEE, MINNESOTA), Hiroyuki Sanada (THE WHITE COUNTESS), Benedict Wong (A COCK AND BULL STORY) and Michelle Yeoh (MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA). And yes, Icharus II has a nice soothing HAL-like voice.

Director, Danny Boyle (TRAINSPOTTING, 28 DAYS LATER), and cinematographer Alwin H Kuchler combine to create some stunning visuals of space stations, passing planets and solar glare. And as things start to go wrong with the mission, they successfully ratchet up the tension. Of course, as the ethical questions and risk-return trade-offs are argued over by the crew, you feel like you're back in Ethics prelims. Heck, that's half the fun of sci-fi! And yes, it is marginally annoying that you can tell who'll last longest by who's the most beautiful and/or bank-able. And I must also admit that not once, not twice, but three times, at least half of the full-house at the National Film Theatre were tittering at unintentionally funny lines.

But for all that, SUNSHINE was a really great sci-fi movie (nicely acted, imagined and realised) until about half an hour into the end, when it turned into another sort of film entirely. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland seriously dropped the ball, and the fact that it still looked stunning and was edited in an innovative way couldn't stop me thinking they'd miscalculated badly. Shame.

SUNSHINE goes on release in Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Jamaica, Malaysia, Peru, Singapore and Taiwan on April 5th; in Iceland, Latvia, Mexico and the UK on April 6th; in Belgium and France on April 11th; in Argentina, Australia and Italy on April 12th; in Brazil, Norway and Poland on April 13th; in Japan on April 19th; in Germany, the Netherlands, Russia and Slovakia on April 19th; in Finland, Spain, and Sweden on April 20th and in Estonia on April 27th. It does not open in the US until September 14th.

MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA - A snowflake of a movie

I use the phrase "visually stunning" to describe movies rather often, but in the case of MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA it is, once again, apt. I guess it is just syptomatic of a world in which Hollywood regularly throws $90million at blockbuster movies. With all that cash, you have to try really hard not to get wonderful sets, stunning costumes and production design. This movie really is beautiful to look at. The geisha themselves are truly art-forms and the world they inhabit is like a fairy-tale land of dark forests, crystal clear rivers, cherry blossom and marshmallow clouds. True, they must contend with rather petty forms of female bitchiness, but the harsher realities of life are kept at bay. When the US bombs Japan, one geisha is sent to the country by her protector, another staves off starvation by - oh, the hardship! - selling a kimono. When the war is over, they pick up where they left off. True, any street-walker can now be a "geisha" and service the US personnel, but for a true geisha, a rich Japanese protector can still be found.

I sat through all two and a half hours of this movie enraptured by the successful evocation of a dream-world Japan. I am sure it is not authentic, but it is lavish, soothing, lovely all the same. However, as I left the screening, the snowflake melted and the spell was broken. Beauty aside, I had gained nothing. The geisha had sold me the same show as her men: she dances, she entertains, but we never see behind the mask. We are not allowed to see whether she feels guilty about her protector's wife and children, or for disappointing the man who is in love with her, let alone her reactions to the dramatic changes in her country. MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA is, then, pretty, but pointless. I guess there are worse things to be.

MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA is on global release