DIANA

You can listen to a podcast review of DIANA below, or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.


Oh dear. I really wanted to like the Prince Diana movie, imaginatively titled DIANA, if only to put two fingers up to the mainstream elitist critical opinion. But the film flops heavily onto our screens with little wit and less understanding - a soppy, weepy love story that hasn't got the balls to tackle the fascinating issues that the Princess embodied. The film never takes on the Royal Family apart from a few shy hints that Diana would have liked to have seen her children more. Charles and Camilla emerge unscathed. The fascination that Diana seems to have had for spiritualists and quacks is unquestioned and unexplored. The influence of her butler, Paul Burrell, uninvestigated. And her capricious relationship with the media - hunted but also manipulating - only very gently hinted at. This movie lets everyone - including the late Princess - off the hook.

So what DO we get? We meet Diana as a lonely woman, fascinated with healing, who falls for a leading heart surgeon, Hasnat Khan.  They begin a shy courtship - an odd couple romance.  She's the Princess who loves classical music and exercise. He's the Pakistani surgeon who likes junk food and jazz.  When push comes to shove, he isn't willing to upset his traditional Muslim family or indeed to have his work compromised by her fame.  She reacts rather childishly by trying to make Hasnat jealous by publicly being photographed with Dodi Fayed, leading to their fateful crash in Paris.  Yes, it's tragic that the mother of young sons died, and even more tragic that her celebrity prevented her from enjoying a fulfilling relationship (if true).  But there is no emotional truth in this movie.  No nuance, empathy or insight.  It's as vacuous as Hello! magazine, but at least THAT has the benefit of the real Princess, rather than poor Naomi Watts, in a career-embarrassing performance, tilting her head to the side and fluttering her eyelids in a succession of bad wigs. 

The mind boggles. How could director Oliver Hirschbiegel, who directed the incredibly powerful, intelligent and affecting Hitler's bunker film, DOWNFALL, have produced something so insipid?  I suspect the blame lies partly with the timid producers, but also with screenwriter Stephen Jeffreys, who wrote a movie so risible it earned the shortest review this blog has ever published, for THE LIBERTINE.  One can only wonder what kind of sympathy Sofia Coppola might have brought to this story, after her luminescent depiction of Marie-Antoinette.  At the very least, her product placement would have been less crass than the long lingering handbag close-up that opens this film.

Eheu o me miserum.

DIANA has a running time of 113 minutes and is rated 12A in the UK for strong language, brief land mine injury and surgical detail. 

DIANA is on release in the UK, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland and Poland. It opens on September 26th in Belgium, Denmark, Portugal and Serbia; on October 3rd in France, Italy, Russia and Sweden; on October 10th in Australia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the UAE, Estonia and Norway; on October 17th in Hong Kong and Japan; on October 25th in Brazil; on November 1st in the USA; on November 7th in Argentina and Finland; on November 14th in the Netherlands; on November 28th in Greece and Singapore; on December 13th in Spain; on January 9th in Germnany; and on February 6th in Chile.  

Flaky ending aside, THE BRAVE ONE is pretty decent

THE BRAVE ONE is more intelligent and more patient than your average revenge thriller. Usually these flicks take a more or less explicit and malicious pleasure in the protagonist beating the crap out of the bad guy. THE BRAVE ONE distinguishes itself by not lingering over the violence at all. Jodie Foster plays a DJ whose fiance is killed by a bunch of thuggish happy-slappers and resorts to killing bad guys in an effort to regain control. The heart of the film is her relationship with the cop who is investigating the case. He's portrayed by Terrence Howard in yet another stand-out performance. The crux of the piece is whether or not Howard's character will have the fortitude to shop the women he knows is guilty of murdering people he knows are beyond the grasp of the justice system he believes in. The film oozes class. The performances are top notch; the camera-work is penetrating; the characters believable....that is, until the final reel. Still, despite the flaky ending, it's great to see the revenge thriller rescued from the trash-can.

THE BRAVE ONE played Toronto 2007 and is on release in the USA, Indonesia, the Philippines, Canada, Taiwan, Thailand, Hong Kong, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Norway, Spain, the UK, Slovenia and Denmark. It opens in Egypt, Australia, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Finland, Iceland and Lithuania next weekend. It opens in Czech Republic and Hungary on October 18th, in Argentina on October 25th, in Japan, Slovakia and Brazil on November 2nd.

GRINDHOUSE - exploitation-tastic-ish

GRINDHOUSE is the new movie double-bill from directors Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. I'm not going to pretend I had a clue what GRINDHOUSE was till I read the production notes. But grindhouse refers to the shabby adult cinemas that were found across America in the 70s until home video put them out of business. It also refers to the lo-fi exploitation flicks that were played back-to-back in these cinemas until the prints were scuffed and scratched and whole reels were missing. To the extent that Rodriguez and Tarantino have always riffed on schlock cinema - from exploitation flicks, to camp horror classics, to spaghetti westerns, to cheesy martial arts epics, GRINDHOUSE is a logical step. Because instead of just subsuming pop cultural references into a slick modern movie, GRINDHOUSE actually looks and feels like crappy worn-out 70s B-movies complete with scratches on the celluloid, missing reels and hysterically funny mock movie trailers. In fact, the trailers have pedigrees to match the main feature, being shot by Eli Roth of HOSTEL fame and the guys behind SHAUN OF THE DEAD and HOT FUZZ. In particular, I liked seeing Danny Trejo as "Machete" - the vengeful hit man with a gun-wielding, Catholic-priest (Benicio Del Toro). (This may actually become Rodriguez' next feature - neat!) The trailer with the killer Nazi were-wolf women and Nic Cage as Fu Manchu also looked awesome.

First up in the double-bill is the Rodriquez zombie-flick, called PLANET TERROR. Rose McGowan is a go-go dancer called Cherry Darling, on the run from rampaging zombies in her ex-boyfriend (Freddy Rodriguez') car. Infected hicks turn up at Doc Block's hospital as Block (Josh Brolin) feuds with his wife, who's about to hook up with her lesbian ex(!) Meanwhile, sinister government agents, in the form of Bruce Willis and Naveen Andrews, are blowing shit up. I was mildly disappointed by PLANET TERROR. The sheer fun of watching a genre pastiche faded with repetition and the story was actually rather boring. It wasn't helped by the fact that Rose McGowan plays her role in very self-conscious camp style - winking at the audience as she goes. For the Grindhouse project to work, all the actors have to act like they are playing these roles for real - to keep the trick alive for the audience. Plus there's the highly subjective issue that I have never really liked zombie pics as a genre, so even a crazy pastiche isn't going to hold my attention for long. To that end, I'd love to know what real fans of these flicks make of PLANET TERROR.

Second up is the Tarantino stalker-slasher-action pic, DEATH PROOF. This stars Kurt Russell as a bad-ass retired movie stunt-man called, da-da-daa!, Stunt-Man Mike. He kills attractive young women by offering them rides home in his "death-proof" car. Sadly, the "death-proofed"-ness only applies to the guy sitting in the drivers seat. Let's be clear, people, this is BY FAR a superior film.* It's superior insofar as its not just a straight pastiche but a genuine reinvention with memorable characters, brilliant dialogue and just enough camp violence to be funny but not boring. The flicks falls into two halves. In the first half we see Stunt-Man Mike stalk and eventually dispatch a bunch of girls (Vanessa Ferlito, Jordan Ladd, Sydney Tamiia Poitier and Rose McGowan again) that are drinking in a bar. As in all Tarantino, the real joy is seeing these normal people talk normal shit but with that added twist that outlandish stuff is round the corner. In the second half of the flick we move to a different set of chicks (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Tracie Thoms, Rosario Dawson and Zoë Bell) driving round in cars. Cue more cute dialogue, crazy car-stunts and a bit of the old comedy violence.

The revelation is that while we all grew up on camp classics and lo-fi B flicks, not even Rodriguez can match Tarantino's genius in spewing out movies that can hold their heads up as genuinely entertaining outside of the pop-culture references that sustain them. Some of the fun of DEATH PROOF is picking up all the references to other QT flicks but, crucially, that's just an added bonus, not the whole deal. While Rodriguez' movie is an interesting exercise, DEATH-PROOF is a movie to watch and re-watch on its own terms.

*And I know Europeans are complaining the the double-feature is being split - so they'll have to pay double than Americans to see both films - but frankly, given what I now know, the wise move would've been to buy a ticket for the double feature and slip in at the 90 minute mark anyways.

GRINDHOUSE was released as a double-feature in the US in April 2007 and will be released as a double-feature in New Zealand on May 31st and in the UK on June 1st.

DEATH PROOF will be released in Estonia, Finland, Italy, Norway and Sweden on June 1st; in Belgium, France, Switzerland, Netherlands, on June 6th/7th; in Germany on June 14th and in Iceland on August 1st. PLANET TERROR will be released in Iceland on June 8th, Estonia on July 6th, the Netherlands on July 19th, Finland on July 20th, Germany on July 26th, Belgium on August 1st, in Norway on September 14th and in Sweden on September 28th.

PROVOKED - sub-daytime TV drama

PROVOKED is a straightforward re-telling of the Kiranjit Ahluwalia case. Kiranjit was an Indian woman who was brought to England for an arranged marriage. She was convicted of murdering her abusive husband in the late 1980s. Because she had killed him two hours after he the latest occasion of domestic abuse, her lawyers could not argue that it was a matter of self-defence. At this point, the Southall Black Sisters - a non-profit support group for abused women - took up Kiranjit's case. They helped launch the appeal that established the British legal precedent of using "battered women's sydrome" as a defence.

The worthiness of the subject matter should not however detract from the fact that this is a poor-quality production. The abrupt cutting between scenes, the hackneyed dialogue, A R Rahman's melodramatic score and the pantomime characterisation and acting do not serve this important story well.

In the world of this film, people are either put-upon victims or evil villains. Kiranjit's husband is particularly one-dimensional, but the prison guards and rozzers are also thinly drawn. The acting is similarly unconvincing. A host of British day-time TV "stars" play versions of their TV characters. So "Phil" from Eastenders is back as a Nasty cop, and "Ash Ferreira" is back as a nice but rather anonymous lawyer. Rebecca Pidgeon, Robbie Coltrane and Miranda Richardson are all decent actors, of course, but the first two have little more than cameos and the the third inhabits a character so unlikely in a story-line so schmaltzy as to be literally incredible. And what of Aishwarya Rai in the starring role? She simpers. And simpers some more. The audience has no glimpse of the emotional life a woman who was driven to brutally kill her husband.

PROVOKED is on release in the UK.