BLACKKKLANSMAN

BLACKKKLANSMAN is a superb, searing, angry film from a very angry film-maker. The astonishing thing is that the film-maker - Spike Lee - manages to command such self-discipline despite his anger, and manages to fashion a film that is both brutal and funny. How many film-makers could straddle that line so expertly? How many could command such a knowledge of film history as to weave classic depictions of racism in a film that feels so authentically of the 1970s, and yet so seamlessly builds to Charlottesville and contemporary racial violence?   To say BLACKKKLANSMAN is a tour de force is an under-statement.  It is provocative, goofy, feel-good, feel-distraught, bloodied but unbowed.  This is cinema at its most heightened, powerful and disturbing.  

The movie opens with a provocation that may have passed some viewers by. Spike Lee spends much of this film both indicting and redeeming mainstream Hollywood films from their role in normalising racism. He opens with GONE WITH THE WIND - a film that depicts subservient slaves oh-so-happy to be taken care off by their paternalistic owners, and actually has a couple of them saye a white girl from rape.  He then has one of Hollywood's most famous black activists - the magnificent Harry Belafonte - indict THE BIRTH OF A NATION for resuscitating the popularity of the KKK. Belafonte shows how the film inspired a lynching, and was praised by then President Woodrow Wilson as "history written in lightning".  Belafonte/Lee show us explicit photographs of what happened to the victim.  Lee  then intercuts this with footage of the KKK recruits being inducted, complete with white hoods, in the 1970s of the main action of the film.  Finally, Lee takes his fictional film and directly connects its subject matter to contemporary America, showing footage of the racial violence in Charlottesville and Trump's mealy-mouthed false equivalence between the white supremacists and those opposing them. It's as if he's saying to us - remember that one president who said how the KKK looked amazing in that super popular film. Well, now I'm taking back your cinema screens and showing you another president, a hundred years later, being similarly racist, and you WILL watch and be shocked and provoked. And boy was it shocking.  Even when you see this footage on twitter videos, or on the news on TV, it's just different - visceral - seeing it on the big screen, especially after the two hours of build up that Spike gives it.

So back to the plot. The film is based on the almost absurd true story of a black cop who infiltrated the Klan back in the 1970s. He did this by ringing them up and asking for info and pretending to want to join.  He even got so far as to speak to David Duke! Of course, when he needed to actually attend those meetings and get enough evidence to arrest people he had to send in someone who was actually white - in this case an actually Jewish cop. So the Klan was doubly fooled.  John David Washington (son of Denzel) gives a quietly powerful portrait of the black cop - Ron Stallworth - and it's actually worth noting his defense of being a cop in the first place to his radical girlfriend. It's a message many in contemporary America need to hear.  There's something noble in being a cop - not all cops have to be racists. Adam Driver is similarly impressive as the Jewish cop who has never particularly felt the power of his race or religion and is forced to address his "passing" when he hears explicit anti-semitism of the first time. 

As the film progresses we see the imposter inducting into the Klan - a Klan that is planning bomb attacks against its enemies. The superficial tension comes from whether our cops will be exposed, and whether the attack will go ahead. And it works. But the real tension comes from Lee taking us right up against the most horrid racism, and keeping us there for 2 hours, and seeing if we will flinch from seeing it play out to its contemporary climax. When it comes it feels earned, brave and bold.  

BLACKKKLANSMAN played Cannes 2018 where it won the Grand Prix. It was released in cinemas this summer and is now available to rent and own. The film is rated R and has a running time of 135 minutes. 

LIVE FROM NEW YORK! - BFI London Film Festival 2015

LIVE FROM NEW YORK! is the directorial debut of Bao Nguyen, chronicling the history of the iconic comedy skit-show Saturday Night Live. He does so in 80 minutes so it would be easy to put this film's superficiality down to its brief run-time but I suspect it has more to do with the director having bought Lorne Michael's kool-aid, wanting to diminish the non-Lorne years and not having the guts to seriously interrogate the charges of institutionalised sexism and racism. And I don't by that "where was the black Friend" argument.  SNL was meant to be different - cutting edge radical. This is what skewers the director's use of hyperbolic opening music - Gil Scott Heron's The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - this may have been true in the 70s and 80s but for the past fifteen years it feels as though the cutting edge of radical satire has lived on South Park or The Daily Show. Let's be honest, isn't SNL mostly harmless by now? Isn't everything that Julia Louis-Dreyfus says about the 80s true now, where SNL was desperately trying to keep pace with pop culture rather than setting the pace?

STILL ALICE

You can listen to a podcast review of this film below or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes:

STILL ALICE starts Julianne Moore in as Oscar-winning turn as Alice Howland - a successful College professor diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's Disease.  The first half hour of the film sees Alice suspect that something serious is behind her sudden memory loss and come to a diagnosis. The second half hour sees the family come to terms with her rapidly deteriorating condition - their bickering, frustration, love but lack of understanding.  The final third of the film focuses on Alice's relationship with her youngest daughter, played by Kristen Stewart - a relationship that was fraught when Alice was well, but finds a new sympathy in her illness.  Alice herself is alienated from herself and much of the rest of her family. This is the true cruelty of Alzheimer's Disease and in that sense the title of the film is ironic. When you take away a woman's intellect, her memory, her job, her sense of self, what is left?

BLUE JASMINE

Woody Allen's latest movie, BLUE JASMINE, isn't better than ANNIE HALL or MANHATTAN, as some over-sugared critics have claimed. But it is the best of his late films, featuring as it does a superlative performance by Cate Blanchett in the title role.  She plays the spoiled, self-deluding wife of a hugely rich financier (Alec Baldwin), who we discover was actually a Bernie Madoff character.  He swindled his clients, including Jasmine's earnest sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), gets taken by the Feds, and leaves Jasmine crushed, shocked, a borderline alcoholic with severe mental problems.

This is how we meet Jasmine - talking to herself on a plane to San Francisco, fashioning a narrative of her life that is elegant and graceful - where she is the victim.  This seems to be her only way of coping.  By struggling through courses to become computer literate she can kid herself that she'll become an interior designer, and resume her place in society as something "substantial". When she lies to her wealthy diplomat suitor (Peter Sarsgaard, thankfully not in a sleazebag role), it isn't so much that she's wilfully lying to him, but that my projecting an image of elegant accomplishment, she can reclaim herself.  It's a survival strategy.

The darker side of this vulnerability manifests itself in how far Jasmine was complicit in her downfall - how much did she really know about her husband's affairs and criminality?  Her stepson certainly judges her harshly, and part of the journey of this film is to get to the root of that problem.  Jasmine also proves to be a hugely disruptive influence on her sister, who under Jasmine's criticism of her current squeeze Chilli (Bobby Cannavale) reaches for something apparently better in Louis C.K.'s romantic sound engineer.   Ginger plays, in a minor key, the same theme as Jasmine - with her issues of self-invention and self-delusion.

The movie is dominated by Blanchett, and rightly so. She alternates between serene confidence and broken vulnerability and everything in between.  But there are other, surprising, moments of brilliance. For instance, seeing Andrew Dice Clay - a figure of menacing fun in Entourage - play a wise, angry ex-husband.  Or Louis C.K. play a soft, romantic.  Or Bobby Cannavale as a loveable rogue.  But the real praise has to go to Woody Allen who, after years of being the most environmentally sustainable of screenwriters, has done something genuinely new and genuinely brilliant.  Many people have tried to put the story of the financial crisis on screen,  but this sideways look at the psychological and emotional fall-out is perhaps the best depiction of its real impact, away from Wall Street.  And one would be hard-pressed to find such a rounded, nuanced and sympathetic middle-aged female character in cinema. 

A podcast review of this film is available here:

BLUE JASMINE has a running time of 98 minutes and is rated PG-13 in the USA and 12A in the UK for infrequent strong language & moderate references to sex & suicide.

BLUE JASMINE opened in August in the USA, Slovakia, Canada, Norway, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Greece, Hungary, Finland and Romania. It is currently on release in Australia, Portugal, Estonia, Iceland, Lithuania, France, South Korea, Russia, Ireland, Turkey and the UK. It opens on October 10th in Argentina and Singapore; on October 17th in Hong Kong; on November 7th in Germany and on December 5th in Italy. 

TO ROME WITH LOVE

TO ROME WITH LOVE is a rather mediocre, derivative, Woody Allen movie - a portmanteau of four stories, neither of which is especially interesting, well-acted or well-developed.  The only real link is that they all take place in Rome - there isn't a link between them - either through the characters or thematically, as far as I can tell. 

The most ill-fitting of the four stories, by virtue of the fact that it's in Italian and also because it isn't romantic but whimsical-philosophical, centres on an ordinary Joe (Roberto Benigni) who suddenly becomes famous for no reason he can see. It's kind of an inverse Josef K situation - and a wry comment on the fatuousness of modern celebrity culture - and reminded  me of early Woody Allen movies where a fantastical idea was worked out to it's ludicrous extreme. The problem is that the story makes a rather simplistic point, and doesn't really take it anywhere.

The story I found simultaneously the best and worst features Woody Allen himself back in an acting role, as a cynical retired impresario who puts his daughter's Italian father-in-law on the stage. Problem is, this simple mortician can only sing when he's in the shower. It's meant to be fantastic and funny but fell rather flat for me. The only redeeming feature was Judy Davis, cast once again as Woody Allen's wife.  She gets the only really funny one-liners of the whole film.

Next up, we have Jesse Eisenberg playing a young Woody Allen character - an unsatisfied cynic who cheats on his earnest girlfriend (Greta Gerwig) with her flighty, flirty best friend (Ellen Page). I really hated this segment, mainly because the romantic triangle is well-worn in Woody Allen; second, because I thought Ellen Page was woefully miscast as the femme fatale; and third, the conceit of having Alec Baldwin play a devil on the shoulder of Jesse Eisenberg's character also just fell flat.

Finally, we have the weakest story of the bunch.  A young Italian couple lose each other - she flirts with an elderly actor and he gets entangled with the cliché Woody Allen brassy whore (Penelope Cruz.) No laughs, no insights, no point.

All in all, after his recent good run, this is an utterly worthless and mirthless movie.  We've seen all this done before - and better. Most of all, it's disappointing to see Jesse Eisenberg wasted on such poor material.  He's an actor who seems to have been playing Woody Allen all his life.

TO ROME WITH LOVE opened earlier this year in Italy, the USA, Argentina, Brazil, Norway, Uruguay, Belgium, France, Israel, Russia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Iceland, Mexico, Denmark, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Germany, Hungary, Finland, Greece and India. It opens this weekend in the UK, Ireland and Lithuania. It opens next weekend in Portugal, Singapore, Estonia and Spain. It opens on September 28th in Taiwan and Turkey; on November 9th in Bulgaria; and on December 20th in New Zealand.

IT'S COMPLICATED - fails to be subversive

IT'S COMPLICATED wants to be a romantic-comedy that subverts convention by giving us an old formerly married couple indulging in an affair. Whether or not you will like this film basically rests on whether you find the concept of Meryl Streep declaring, "turns out, I'm a bit of a slut" funny or not. Sadly, writer-director Nancy Meyers does not develop the humour beyond the initial concept. Oh, I forget, she has ex-husband and current lover Alec Baldwin sneak around Meryl's house peering into windows at her new date (a completely under-used Steve Martin). Baldwin trips and falls. Oh, how funny.

Thin comedy aside, what else does this movie offer? A risible attempt to actually examine the impact this affair would have on the husband's new younger wife, her son, and on the couple's grown children. Any attempt at emotional profundity is undercut by the fact that the script is superficial; Alec Baldwin simply doesn't have the acting range; and Meryl Streep chooses not to use her god-given talent but instead simply mugs to camera.

Worst of all, this movie - which seeks to oh so daringly depict love among the fifty-somethings as a valid concern in our youth-obsessed age - is itself ludicrously obsessed with surface appearance. Indeed, it plays less like a rom-com and more like a feature length advertisement for life in Santa Barbara - all gorgeous properties, perfect interior design, chi-chi food stores, and sweeping drives. When Meryl Streep laments the fact that it took her ten years to get over her divorce and feel confident enough to remodel her house and get the kitchen she always wanted, you look at her current kitchen and wander what the fuck is her problem.

Overall, this is a movie about a bunch of people who live a life of over-designed ease. They are all basically self-obsessed and unlikeable. I didn't buy that they were having a genuine emotional journey. I didn't want them to live happily ever after. I wanted the movie to end very, very quickly indeed.

IT'S COMPLICATED was released in the US, Belgium, France, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Canada, Finland, Spain and Norway in 2009. It is currently on release in the UK, Australia and Argentina. It opens next weekend in Israel, Russia, Singapore and Estonia and opens on the 21st in Denmark, Germany and Sweden. It opens in Croatia on January 28th, in Romania on February 19th, in Japan on February 19th and in Brazil on February 26th. It opens in Turkey on March 5th and in Italy on March 19th.

MY SISTER'S KEEPER - slippery

Not having read Jodi Picoult's book, and going purely by the trailers, I had thought that MY SISTER'S KEEPER would be a provocative courtroom drama examining the moral and legal issues around "savior siblings" - that is, children conceived in order to provide perfect match organs to their cancer-ridden siblings. But MY SISTER'S KEEPER isn't actually interested in the legal dilemma but the simpler story of a family under extraordinary emotional pressure. Yes, the other siblings may be taken for granted by their parents, but it isn't really the issue of organ-harvesting but a wider issue of just spending time with them. And the movie isn't so much about the ethics of taking organs from children who cannot consent, but about coming to terms with the fact that people die and not all battles can be won. In other words, this is a Weepie rather than an intellectual film.

To the extent that this movie wasn't a courtroom drama, I was disappointed. And I was rather annoyed at the slippery way in which this aspect of the movie was derailed. But then again, how credible was a courtroom drama really going to be given that Cameron Diaz is cast as the aggressively pro-organ donation lawyer-mother - a role beyond her ability - and Alec Baldwin (a prisoner of his 30 ROCK persona) was cast as opposing council. Only Joan Cusack, as a grieving mother and presiding Judge, adds any emotional weight and credibility to those scenes.

So how did the resulting emotional drama hold up? I didn't like a lot of the stylistic choices - particularly the voice-overs from the different characters explaining their points of view. (Although this is apparently a feature of the book). I especially didn't like the happy-family sunlit montages set to schmaltzy music. Jason Patric as the passive father looked mostly bored. Cameron Diaz as the aggressive mother looked mostly hysterical. Aunt Kelly looked entirely redundant. Ignored younger brother Jesse just looked mopey and is it me, or is Abigail Breslin just acting the same in all her films.? I feel she is over-exposed. The only thing that saved the story was the luminous lead performance from Sofia Vassilieva as the cancer-ridden teen, the touching evocation of her first and only romance with a fellow patient, and the realistic portrayal of her illness. This girl is definitely one to watch. I also applaud the writer-director for creating an ending that is, apparently, more realistic than that in the original novel.

MY SISTER'S KEEPER is on release in the UK, USA, Canada and Mexico. It opens next week in Iceland and Greece. It opens on July 30th in Australia and New Zealand; on August 6th in Slovakia; on August 13th in Russia, Ukraine and Taiwan; on August 21st in Romania, on August 27th in the Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands, and Bulgaria; on September 4th in Italy and Norway; on September August 9th in September; on September 17th in Portugal; on September 23rd in Belgium, Argentina, Brazil and Sweden; and on December 4th in Finland.

BROOKLYN RULES - piss-poor coming-of-age mafiosi flick

A movie so risible it went straight to video everywhere but the US, BROOKLYN RULES is a derivative, poorly-written, poorly-acted coming-of-age mafiosi flick that presumably puts the final nail in the feature film careers of Mena Suvari and Freddie Prinze Junior. It's a tale of childhood friends who grow up in Brooklyn (no!). One studies hard and gets a shot at college. Another gets caught up in organised crime (as embodied by Alex Baldwin in a phoned-in performance). Dramatic clashes ensue. Except they're not very dramatic. Michael Corrente's direction is ham-fisted, but the real problem is with Terrence Winter's piss-poor script. What did we expect from the man who penned the offensively poor Fiddy vehicle, GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN?

BROOKLYN RULES was released in 2007 and is available on DVD.

MADAGASCAR: ESCAPE 2 AFRICA - great fun despite the surfeit of characters

The Kid and I had a great time watching the MADAGASCAR sequel. It's a film full of loveable characters voiced by brilliant comedians. The animation is stunning - the African landscapes made me pine for Thika. The humour is character-led rather than relying on smart-ass pop-cultural references. And let's not forget those penguins, who are as good as anything from the old AIRPLANE! movies. (What else would we expect from Etan Cohen, a writer who is steeped in Hollywood satire and penned the patchy but occasionally brilliant TROPIC THUNDER).

The movie sees four New York zoo animals, stranded in Madagascar, make an attempt to fly back to New York in a battered plane piloted by penguins. The pile of junk only makes it as far as Africa, and the animals are pleasantly surprised to be back among their own kind. The hero, Alex the lion (Ben Stiller), finds his real mum and dad, but LION KING-stylee is banished by an evil lion called Makunga (Alex Baldwin). Once again, the key conflict is that Alex just wants to be an entertainer instead of being a ferocious hunter. Marty the Zebra (Chris Rock) is disturbed to find that all zebras are alike - and in a bravura racial commentary - that his friends can't tell him apart from the herd. Meanwhile Melman the Zebra (David Schwimmer) has to pluck up the courage to tell Gloria the Hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith) that he loves her - a plot line all the more piquant insofar as it shadows the Ross-Rachel plot-line from FRIENDS.

The only problem with the film is that it is, in a sense, a victim of its own success. The film-makers have created four lead characters that we care about, let alone the comic light relief in the form of the aforementioned penguins and Sacha Baron Cohen's King Julien - equally as entertaining as the main plot. So you do get the feeling that lots of different characters are fighting for attention in a serious of stories that are never given as much room to breathe as necessary.

MADAGASCAR: ESCAPE 2 AFRICA is already on release in Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, the Philippines, the US, the Czech Republic, Singapore, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Israel, Egypt, Portugal, Iceland, Romania, Spain, Turkey, Belgium, France, Argentina, Chile, Germany, Mexico and the UK. It goes on release next week in Croatia, Brazil, Estonia and Venezuela. It opens on December 18th in Australia, Greece, Israel, Italy and Hong Kong. It opens in Poland on January 1st, in South Korea on January 8th and in Japan on March 14th.

MY BEST FRIEND'S GIRL - not to my taste, but I can imagine Dane Cook fans having a great time

From, improbably, the director of PRETTY IN PINK, comes a gross-out romantic comedy. Jason Biggs (AMERICAN PIE) is typecast as the desperate loser whose girlfriend (Kate Hudson) dumps him. In a characteristically contrived set-up, he hires his best-friend - a sort of anti-HITCH - who takes girls on piss-poor dates so that they realise how nice they guys they just dumped were and ask to get back with them. Problem is, the anti-Hitch and the girl actually hit it off. What follows is a bi-polar movie. The first two-thirds are firmly in gross-out territory with lots of non-politically correct dating humour. In the final third, the movie loses its balls and flips into a typically schmaltzy rom-com. I don't particularly find Dane Cook's brand of whacky humour funny, and I certainly don't dig formulaic rom-com's so I pretty much hated this film. BUT I can perfectly envisage fans of Dane Cook really having a great time with this film. So it's basically an alpha-gamma review. This movie does what it does. It's not to all tastes, so think carefully before you go, and hopefully you'll have a good time either way!

MY BEST FRIEND'S GIRL is on release in Greece, Hungary, Russia, Thailand, the US, the Philippines, Israel, Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Belgium, Brazil, Iceland, Turkey, Spain, New Zealand, South Korea, Estonia, Finland, Poland and the UK. It opens in Portugal on November 27th and in Sweden on December 5th.

THE GOOD SHEPHERD - the duracell bunny of spy flicks

Like the Duracell bunny, THE GOOD SHEPHERD goes on...and on....and on...with nary a emotional hook or surprising plot twist to keep you going. I swear if I hadn't been on a date I would have walked out. Over designed and directed, this ponderous three hour movie drags its heels through twenty years of the life of the American secret service like so much cement.

The story sees a young Matt Damon recruited into the prototype of the CIA - working for US Secret Ops from London and then Berlin. Married to a woman he does not love (Angelina Jolie) and father to a son he barely sees, he ascends the bureaucrat ladder until, twenty years later, he becomes involved in the Cuban invasion. Insofar as the story has an emotionally sterile man at its heart, it should come as no surprise that I felt so emotionally uninvolved in the film. Damon's performance does what it should, but with the minutes ticking on I felt strangely uninvolved in Jolie's emotional life.

As a spy thriller, the movie fares even worse. The writer tries to inject a little Smiley-Karla competition by pitting Damon's CIA man against a KGB counter-part codenamed Ulysses. The denouement is a weak mirror of the means by which Smiley finally ensnares Karla, for all you fans of the infinitely superior early spy-novels of John le Carre. The film-makers were unwise in bringing such a comparison to the viewers attention. Where le Carre used to be deft, economical, cynical but still a little romantic; where characters were quirky, fascinating, constantly evolving; Eric Roth gives us the most turgid screenplay I have seen filmed since MUNICH. It's no coincidence.

Other minor gripes: Billy Crudup makes a hash of an upper class English accent in his portrayal of a British spy; Alec Baldwin is wasted as a Fed; as is John Turturro as Damon's side-kick/heavy; the make-up do not make Damon look convincing as an older man; ditto Jolie as an older woman.....

THE GOOD SHEPHERD was released in the US in December 2006 and has since opened in Brazil, Australia, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Austria, Venezuela, Argentina, Russia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Poland and the UK. It opens in Latvia and Sweden on March 2nd; in Turkey and Italy on March 9th; in France and Switzerland on March 21st and in Singapore on March 29th. It opens in Spain on April 4th and in Belgium on April 18th. THE GOOD SHEPHERD is released on Region 1 DVD at the end of March.

THE DEPARTED - subtle, it ain't

Why remake an already much-heralded brilliant Hong Kong thriller? Because people in the West won't read subtitles? I just don't get it. But I really wanted to give THE DEPARTED a chance because the basic concept is so cool that any chance to revisit it is a pleasure.

In this version, Leonardo di Caprio plays a young cop from a mixed-up background who is recruited by Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg's characters to infiltrate the Irish mafia. No other cops know his real identity. di Caprio does well in the organisation but finds the violence and deceit are getting to him. He turns in increasing desperation to an attractive shrink and his bosses - he wants his identity back. Meanwhile, the Irish gang-leader - a sleazy mass-murderer called Costello (Jack Nicholson), has planted a mole in the State police service. That mole, played by Matt Damon, is ironically tasked with finding out who the mole in the police service is. So begins a cat and mouse game in which each side knows there is a leak and the two moles run ever decreasing circles around each other.

In this movie, Martin Scorsese stays pretty close to the plot of INFERNAL AFFAIRS but tinkers with the delicate balance of the original. He spends a lot more time on the back story of the characters and on their relationships with a shrink - a big mistake as it holds the movie up, and focuses attention on the one weak link in the acting. Scorsese also beefs up the role of Costello - the gang leader. As a result, whereas INFERNAL AFFAIRS was about two men and their relationship with each other in absentia, THE DEPARTED is really about each man's relationship with Costello.

Which brings me to my real problem with this movie. Scorsese takes a movie that is subtle, emotionally searing and actually not that violent and transforms it into a movie loud, violent mess. And no-where is this more evident than in the characterisation of Costello - the mob boss played by Jack Nicholson. Nicholson gives the kind of performance we have come to expect over the last few decades. He verges on self-parody - almost at times playing The Joker from Batman - not least when literally bearing his teeth and trying to sniff out a rat in his organisation. The egregiousness of the movie is summed up by the fact that, when the final climactic scene reuniting the two moles occurs, we are too benumbed to be blown away by it. Indeed, the audience in the screening I attended laughed at the unintentional humour of the bombastic closing scenes. And then we have the closing shot of the movie, that literally has a rat running along a balcony. I mean, could you lay the symbolism on any heavier?

Which is not to say that this is not an accomplished movie. Scorsese is backed up by his usual high-class crew. The camera is operated by Michael Ballhaus, Thelma Schoonmaker cuts the movie. Sandy Powell does the costumes and Krista Zea does the producton design. That means we get the fluid camera-work that Scorsese is known for and some gritty Boston-looking locales. But frankly, as beautiful as this movie sometimes looks, it's no match for Christopher Doyle's work in the original. And that can be said for the acting too. Leonardo di Caprio gives a career-best performance as Billy Costigan, but it still pales in comparison with the subtlety and emotional depth that Tony Leung brought to the same role. Matt Damon is just fine. He doesn't set the pulse racing in the way he did in RIPLEY or Andy Lau did in the original. In smaller roles, Ray Winstone, Martin Sheen and Alec Baldwin are given little to do. And as I said before, I have big problems with Jack Nicholson's choices. The only guy I thought was outstanding was Mark Wahlberg.

Overall, I found THE DEPARTED over long, dreary, heavy-handed and a riot where we could have had a much quiter, much more affecting movie. I was prepared to take it on its own merits and not compare it with the original - and I only wish that Scorsese had come up with a good Scorsese movie - big and loud yes, but gripping and unforgettable. Instead, we just get this over-blown mess.

THE DEPARTED opens this week in the Philppines, Malaysia, russia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, The UK and the US. It opens next week in Indonesia, Asutralia, New Zealand, Singapore, Estonia and Latvia and the week after in Italy and Spain. It opens in November in Iceland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, France and Israel. It opens in Germany, Sweden and Belgium in December; in Argentina and Poland in January 2007 and in Japan in March 2007.

ELIZABETHTOWN – Not even the genius that is Alec Baldwin can save this mess

Cameron Crowe’s new movie ELIZABETHTOWN is so bad that The Onion spoofed it this week. Cameron Crowe’s new movie is so bad that even a cameo from that God Among Men, Alec “Two Macs” Baldwin cannot save it. Cameron Crowe’s new movie is so bad that Susan Sarandon frickin’ tap-dances at her husband’s memorial service.

But, my friends, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad tales about the death of kings. Do you remember when Cameron Crowe delivered funny, sweet movies with kickass sound-tracks? Do you remember when Cuba Gooding Junior “showed us the money” in “Jerry Maguire” and when Tom Cruise had Renee Zellwegger at “hello”? Well, my friends, Cameron Crowe has just flushed his indie credentials down the toilet.

Should I even bother telling you the plot? Heck, why not? Just for the sake of tradition. ELIZABETHTOWN tells the story of a young trainer designer – oh yes – played by the Elf from Lord of the Rings. The Elf designs a trainer called the Spasmotica, which is, well, so spastic, that it loses the Nike-a-like shoe company – cue Dr. Evil – “ONE BILLION DOLLARS!” This, we are told by the Phil Nike character, played with Crocodilian charm by Alec Baldwin, “is a lot of money”.

So the Elf is fired. He is about to commit suicide when his dad dies and he has to go to Elizabethtown to arrange the memorial service. En route he meets a perkier than perky air stewardess played by Kirsten Dunst. They talk a lot on the phone. They make out. The whole thing descends into something so sickly sweet it could be on a Hallmark card. The final 30 minutes of the film is deeply deeply irritating – to the extent that I defy you not to walk out of the theatre. The only plus point is that it was 30 minutes shorter than when the film showed at Toronto. Cameron Crowe was shamed into cutting it down by the ritual suicide of all film critics in North America.

Can I say something nice about this film? Dunst and Bloom are perfectly fine. It is the lame-ass script that lets them down. Dunst in particular is asked to inhabit a character so annoying she should be shot on site as a lesson to others. She says stuff like “Men see things in a box, and women see them in a round room.” I kid you not. Alec Baldwin is awesome. So, if you can, sneak into the movie theatre, watch the first 20 minutes, then sneak out.

ELIZABETHTOWN opened in the US on the 14th October, in France on the 2nd November, Germany on the 3rd November and in Austria and the UK on the 4th November. But once again, I urge you NOT to see it.