MOTHER'S INSTINCT*

Cinematographer Benoit Delhomme turns director in this woefully mediocre "thriller" apparently based on a Belgian film, and a novel before that.  It's basically a two-hander between Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway, both great actresses ill-served by a script and direction that fail to ratchet up suspense, fear or paranoia.  Chastain's Alice and Hathaway's Celine start as best friends in early 60s suburbia. Celine's son Max dies in an accident and she then develops an unhealthy obsession with Alice's similarly aged son Theo.  At this point we are meant to get into a paranoid thriller where Alice questions her own sanity as Celine gaslights her. The problem is there isn't much plot, and what there is is very predictable.  Worst of all, the thematics - claustrophobic, judgmental suburbia - misogynistic husbands - are  briefly touched upon but never developed. I was expecting either Hitchcockian darkness and frights or Sirkian melodrama. I got neither. What a waste of my time and the leading ladies' talent!

MOTHER'S INSTINCT was released back in March 2024, has a running time of 94 minutes, and is rated R.

SERENITY

And so the McConaughaissance crests its wave with this awkwardly shit thriller from British writer-director Steven Knight (LOCKE, PEAKY BLINDERS).  McConaughey plays a washed up fisherman/tour guide for rich tourists on a paradise tropical island with a trademark wise loyal sidekick played by Djimon Hounsou.  All goes tits up when his ex-wife turns up begging him to kill her new abusive husband for the sake of their son.  The key issue is that earnest sweet princess-next-door Anne Hathaway sucks at playing a femme fatale, and there is zero chemistry between her and McC.  You wade through an hour of this awfulness and then the plot gets a bit twisty and momentarily interesting, except that you can't shake the feeling that this would all have been handled with more wit, brevity and horror in a BLACK MIRROR episode. 

Avoid at all costs. 

SERENITY is rated R and has a running time of 106 minutes. It is now available to rent and own.

OCEAN'S EIGHT

The OCEAN'S films - when they work - work because they show us a group of people who are all friends in real life, having a really good time getting up to no good.  The original Rat Pack oozed cool and elegance - they created an exclusive guy's club but had the generosity to let us inside for 90 minutes. The cast of the Stephen Soderbergh remake may not have all been best friends in real life, but the relationship between Brad Pitt and George Clooney was real enough, and they all did genuinely look like they were having a blast. Moreover, they were lucky enough to be filmed by Soderbergh with a deliciously luxe, cool, 70s infused kinetic energy, and to have a soundtrack of Dave Grusin-y goodness.

The problem with this new all-girl remake is that it fails to deliver that spark, that fun, that attractive glamour.  I didn't believe these girls were actually friends or had any kind of relationship.  The movie had no tension. It had only one genuine laugh. And at its centre - the message was rather cold. 

Let's break it down. The movie opens with Sandra Bullock playing the late Danny Ocean's sister Debbie. As in the Clooney version, she gets out of jail with a plan for a heist and assembles the gang to pull it off together with her best friend and sidekick Lou (Cate Blanchett in biker chic mode).  There are some surprisingly big names in the ensemble cast and then a smattering of younger musicians in there - Rihanna, Awkwafina - presumably to attract a younger more diverse audience. So much of this film feels made on a spreadsheet by the finance department calculating to maximise revenue. The con is that the girls will get a fashion designer (Helena Bonham Carter playing herself with an Irish accent) to insist that a Hollywood star (Anne Hathaway satirising herself) wears a $150m Cartier necklace to the Met Gala.  From there, the girls will make the actress eat a dodgy bowl of soup, throw up it the bathroom, and have the necklace switched with a 3-D printed fake.  Their jewellery expert (Mindy Kaling) will break up the necklace and the girls will wear different parts of it out. 

All of this sounds promising enough as a basic heist story. The problem is that the girls have no fun together.  Only Anne Hathaway really has any fun with it.  The script contains no tension or wit - and why you'd give such a major project to a first time screenwriter - Olivia Milch - is beyond me. I don't care if she's the producer, she's out of her depth, and the soggy, mediocre script sinks the movie. Then you later on pedestrian direction from Gary Ross (THE HUNGER GAMES) and a really mediocre repetitive score from Daniel Pemberton (ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD). The result is a film that can't really be truly bad given the talented cast, but one that simply fails to ignite. The final nail in the coffin is that this film has no heart. In the first movie we forgive Danny his criminality because he's charismatic and fun, but most of all because he wants to win back his girl.  In this film, his avatar is setting up a treacherous ex (Richard Armitage). This lends a subtly petty and nasty undertone rather than a loving glow. 

OCEAN'S 8 has a running time of 110 minutes and is rated PG-13. The film was released in cinema's this summer. 

THE INTERN

Writer-director Nancy Meyers has carved a niche as the purveyor of banal, slightly funny chick comedies, often focussing on romance among the older generation.  Evidence for the prosecution would include SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE, IT'S COMPLICATED and now THE INTERN. This is a harmless, very schmaltzy, barely comedy starring Robert de Niro as a 70 year old widower who goes to work for Anne Hathaway's stressed out boss of an internet start-up.  We're told again and again that Hathaway's character, Jules, is meant to be hard to deal with. A younger version of Meryl Streep's character in THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA if you will. But of course neither Hathaway nor Meyers are willing to let Jules get that ugly and so we are less invested in how charming silver fox Ben (de Niro) gets through to her. Turns out that she's actually all soft and fuzzy, and so is he, and that she's just battling with being asked to take on a CEO, and a dissatisfied stay at home dad. Naturally he becomes an avuncular figure, giving advice to all the lost millennials in the office and brings Jules some measure of work-life balance.  There's nothing actively bad about this movie. It's earnest and decently enough acted and does what is says on the tin. It's just sad to see a movie so transparent in its plot movements and emotional manipulation.

THE INTERN has a running time of 121 minutes and is rated PG-13. The movie is on global release.

DON JON - LFF 2013 - Day Nine

Joseph Gordon Levitt's directorial debut is a whole lot of fun, and beyond that a brave and nicely observed tale of a young man who manages to move beyond his porn addiction to a place where he can have a meaningful relationship.

The fun comes from his situating the story in a kind of Jersey Shore heightened reality neighbourhood where men where wife beaters, women where massive earrings and chew gum, and you can be out banging chicks on a Saturday night, and confess in Church on  a Sunday morning.  It was wonderful to see Tony Danza back on screen as the father of the protagonist, the Don Jon of the title,  all football and swearing and lech'ing over his son's hot new girlfriend, Barbara.  I love how Scarlett Johansen perfectly captures that broad Jersey accent, and the sly manipulations of the gorgeous girlfriend who holds out.

But really this is Joseph Gordon Levitt's show.  He's utterly compelling and charismatic and convincing as Don Jon, both in his schmucky porn using phase, and in his exploration of actual emotion phase. And believe me, when the movie takes that right turn into that emotional awakening, it's genuinely moving, and it's quite a feat for the movie to be able to move from the heightened comedy of the first half to the depth of the second half.

Is the movie perfect? No.  I didn't like how derivative the character of Don Jon's sister (Brie Larson) was.  She was basically a comically silent chick all the way through the movie, always texting people on her phone. Then, in the final reel, she puts down the phone and dispenses some dope wisdom much to everybody's surprise.  Everybody, that is, who hasn't seen Kevin Smith's Silent Bob character.

But aside from that, Don Jon is a really brave and funny story that made me laugh and made me think.  Can't wait to see what Joseph Gordon Levitt does next!

DON JON has a running time of 90 minutes and has been rated R in the USA.

DON JON played Sundance, Berlin, SXSW, Toronto and London 2013.  It was released earlier this year in Russia, Hong Kong, Canada, Estonia, Taiwan, the USA, Israel, Lithuania, Romania, Portugal and Turkey.  It opens this weekend in Mexico and next weekend in Greece, Italy, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden. It opens on October 31st in Norway, on November 1st in Finland, on November 7th in Denmark, Singapore and Brazil, on November 14th in Argentina, Germnay, Ireland, Poland and the UK, on November 20th in Belgium, on November 28th in Chile and on December 25th in France. 

OSCARS 2013 - Nobody Knows Anything

“When I was your age, television was called books.”

The typical post-Oscar water-cooler conversation is a bitch-fest about who wore what and who gushed most.* But we here at Movie Reviews For Greedy Capitalist Bastards are, in fact, far more concerned with who won what, whether the predictions were right, and who on the Hollywood Power List wins and loses. Coming off of the London Film Festival, I’d strongly tipped Ben Affleck’s ARGO for Oscar gold, on the basis that while it was “just” a straightforward thriller, it showed Hollywood producers’ saving the day, thus pandering to the infamous narcissism of the Academy.  When the nominations were announced and Affleck was snubbed for Best Director, the movie became the sure winner for Best Film purely on the basis that it would attract the sympathy vote.  This left the Best Director award dangerously unpredictable. Would Steven Spielberg, often overlooked, benefit from Affleck’s omission? We can all agree that LINCOLN is basically a vehicle for some great performances and a superb script, but there’s something admirable and almost shocking in the fact that the Master Purveyor of Schmaltz had the balls to show America’s most iconic president as a vote-buying, devious tyrant. .

It turns out that, despite watching well over 300 films last year, reading all the trades, and trying to read the runes, that I was almost comprehensively wrong in my predictions. In the event, the Academy almost took the earnest, gold-plated film-making of LINCOLN for granted, and shied away from the controversy surrounding the veracity of ZERO DARK THIRTY. Instead, they awarded prizes to Anne Hathaway, maybe because she wanted it so damn much; to Christoph Waltz, because he’s so damn cool; and to Ang Lee for LIFE OF PI.  This last choice is the one that intrigues me the most.  LIFE OF PI is the quintessential art-house film. With no marquee names and an impossible-to-categorize plot, the film is almost willfully obscure.  Worse still for a voter demographic that skews old and conservative, the movie has a pronounced anti-religious message and an ending that is,  to put it bluntly, a monumental downer. And yet, this is the movie that won the most Oscars, not least Best Director and the most prestigious of the technical gongs, Best Cinematographer for Claudio Miranda.

So, to put it bluntly, how did we all get it so wrong?  (And by we, I refer to the loose fraternity of cinephiles, critics, bloggers and rune-readers). Well, I guess that in the words of the famous William Goldman, “nobody knows anything”.  Nobody knows if a movie’s gonna be a hit. Nobody knows if a movie’s going to make money. If there were any kind of science to this thing, movies wouldn’t be, after airlines, the easiest industry in which to lose money.  But nihilism aside, I suspect that moving Oscar voting online probably skewed the voter demographic younger and edgier. Anecdotally, the e-voting was glitchy and hard to work around.  More substantially, maybe there was a sympathy vote for LIFE OF PI because the CGI studio that did the spectacular work on the movie’s virtual star, the tiger Richard Parker, went bankrupt the week before the ceremony.

Or maybe, it's just another example of the triumph of the Hive Mind over elite judgment? PR company Way to Blue analysed over one million social media mentions in the week leading up to the Oscars, to find that the British cloud chatter correctly predicted the four Majors – Best Film, Director, Actor and Actress – in sharp contrast to most film critics.   The message from the Oscars, as with the US Presidential Election, seems to be that pundits claim to know everything but know nothing; while the Hive Mind claims to know nothing but knows everything.  Which leaves us with the following score-sheet:

Life of Pi 4; Lincoln 3.

Rousseau 1; Hobbes 0.

*I think we can all agree that most of the actresses in white looked like they were wearing wedding dresses; Nicole Kidman needs to dress her age; and that if we were married to a fashion mogul, we’d have dressed better than Salma Hayek. 

LES MISERABLES

Helena Bonham Cartier as the devious Madame Thenardier

For the improbable few who don't know, Les Miserable is a remarkable novel by Victor Hugo, set in mid nineteenth century, post-Napoleonic France.  The main character is a good but traduced man called Jean Valjean who lives under an alias to escape his convict past.  He is hunted by Javert, a cop whose strict adherence to the rule of law will not admit mercy or humanity.  In the first half, Valjean is redeemed by the mercy of a priest, witnesses the death of a seamstress turned hooker called Fantine and promises to care for her daughter Cosette. Together they escape Javert in the anonymity of Paris.  In the second half, Cosette falls in love with a revolutionary young aristo called Marius, who is also beloved by the sad little innkeepers' daughter, Eponine. Valjean realises that rather than escape Javert by fleeing to London, he must save Marius from certain death on the barricade. In doing so, he challenges Javert to let him pass with the dying boy, thus fundamentally destroying Javert's worldview and self worth.  Javert commits suicide, and Valjean dies, his family knowing his true worth. 

In the 1980s, the novel was reworked as a musical by Claude-Michel Schoenberg and Alan Boublil. They stripped the Victor Hugo classic of its baggy social exposition leaving the bare bones of a story of young love crossed with a tragedy of redemption versus the rule of law. They also added a handful of truly superb songs and the comic relief of the con-artist inn-keepers, the Thenardiers. The result was a product of memorable songs, and overt sentimentality.  The only character of any real psychological interest was the conflicted Javert.  Even poor Eponine, suffering unrequited love, is so good that she leads her beloved Marius to Cosette.  It is, then, almost uniquely, a movie in which all the major characters are wholly good, and their songs speak to worthy but unfulfilled longing.  There are no song and dance numbers here. It's just torch song after torch song interspersed with the one truly comic number at the inn.

I am conflicted about Tom Hooper's translation of the musical to the big screen.  There is much to be commended.  He forces the actors to sing live during the take, rather than miming to a prerecorded track, giving the movie an emotional authenticity that is entirely novel.  Surely movie musicals can never go back from this new high bar?  Hooper is also unabashedly faithful to the original - capturing its grandeur and melodrama, ringing every last tear from his audience. I doubt any fan of the original will be disappointed with this on-screen translation. Hooper is fortunate in his cast. Hugh Jackman's background in musical theatre is well known and it shines through here with his heartbreaking Valjean. We have seen Amanda Seyfried sing in MAMA MIA! and are unsurprised by her pretty but slightly too trilly soprano.  Anne Hathaway and Eddie Redmayne as Fantine and Marius prove to be highly capable singers too.   The only weak link is Russell Crowe as Javert, but I didn't mind this at all as it is far more important that we believe his psychological deterioration in the final act - an d Crowe sells this well.  Of course, it was predictable that Eponone, played by Sarah Barkman, would be a scene-stealer given her theatrical background, and as usual we get the Papageno/Poor Joe effect with little Daniel Huttlestone as Gavroche.  As comic turns, Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen are predictably superb as the Thenardiers. 

Behind the camera, I love the ambition of Tom Hooper's vision.  The first scene that rises through murky waters to high above a dangerously listing great ship.  The choice of a beautifully ornate Catholic Church on an isolated hilltop for Valjean's conversion.  The use of colour in the scenes with barricades - the red of Enjolras' coat.  The metaphor of having Javert always walk on the edge of the precipice.  I particularly liked the idea of Fantine singing "I dreamed a dream" almost immediately after selling herself for the first time, utterly destroyed and vulnerable.

But there is one directorial choice that I found utterly grating, and for which I think the Academy was right to deny Hooper a Best Director nomination because it is so very fundamental to the success of the film. As I said before, Les Mis is different because the songs are rather uniform. There are no song and dance numbers, and only one out and out comic turn. Rather we have a mix of earnest, heartbreaking torch songs and earnest heartbreaking doomed political chants. Unfortunately, Hooper has chosen not to  vary his style of filming. In general he cuts between camera angles but keeps his camera still and focused, often in extreme close-up, on the singer.  I get this with Valjean's conversion. And I get it for Fantine's big turn.  But for every other song? By the time I got to Marius' "Empty chairs at empty tables" I was desperate for some kind of variation, and this detracted from Redmayne emoting his heart out. This lack of directorial imagination, or perhaps the fixation with a novel idea that was taken too far, is this movie's Achilles Heel.  So that while it works emotionally, and the performances and design impress, as a work of pure cinema, it fails. 

LES MISERABLES is on release in Japan, Australia, Hong Kong, Canada, Singapore, Spain, the USA, Hungary, Malaysia, the Czech Republic, Kuwait, Lebanon, Portugal, Bulgaria, Lithuania, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Ireland, Mexico, the UK and Vietnam.  It opens on January 18th in Estonia, Iceland, Norway and Sweden; on January 25th in Poland and Romania; on January 31st in Italy, Slovenia, Thailand and Brazil; on February 8th in Russia and Taiwan; on February 14th in Cyprus, France, Argentina and Greece; on February 21st in Belgium, Germany and Finland; on March 1st in Turkey and on March 21st in Denmark.

LES MISERABLES is rated PG 13 in the USA and the running time is 157 minutes.

A ruminative essay on THE DARK KNIGHT RISES - Spoilers replete

I respect Christopher Nolan as a film-maker. He applies an unusual degree of intelligence to genre films and he is not unafraid of radically rethinking a franchise.   At a technical level, I admire Nolan's unabashed commitment to delivering the highest quality, most immersive images to the movie-going audience.  That means that Nolan still shoots on film rather than digitally, with a preference for IMAX.  He does not shoot 3D movies because he understands that 3D technology, as it currently stands, cannot rationalise the point of convergence and the point of focus, and that this subconsciously brings us out of the movie.  Nolan is thus a man of integrity when it comes to his technical approach to film-making and is to be applauded.

All of which is pre-amble to the fact that despite going into this film with high hopes (though not over-hyped), I left disappointed.  It's by no means a bad movie - I loved the thematic material.  But as entertainment goes, the set piece action sequences were impressive technically but didn't set my pulse racing.  There were too many characters and story arcs - too many plot developments that felt unearned.  Ultimately I just didn't care.  

THEMATIC MATERIAL

To begin with the thematic material - which I found to be insightful and thought-provoking - the first major discussion was about the MORAL AMBIGUITY OF BENEVOLENT INTERVENTION.

The Gotham of THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is a peaceful, almost banal place, in which the peace has been bought with a lie and repression.  Batman has taken the fall for Harvey Dent's death, allowing Commissioner Gordon to create support for the repressive Dent Act.  Running through the film is an intelligent discussion about how far with-holding choice from ordinary people can ever be a good thing.  Even if born of benevolence, were Batman and Gordon right to assume that they had to manufacture a "White Knight" to corral public opinion toward crime-fighting?  Shouldn't they have had faith in the public? And even if that faith were misplaced, what right did they have to distort the truth?  They certainly pay a harsh price for their machinations.  In the first hour of the movie we see that Gordon has driven away his family, is about to be sacked, and is lying severely wounded in hospital.  Batman's body has also failed him - his joints wrecked by ill-use and  prior injury.  Their bodies are symbols of moral decay - the literal manifestation of the corrosive impact of living a lie. Ultimately, their lie will be exposed by Bane, but it is welcomed as a liberation.  In a sense, Bane, Gordon and Batman are in agreement.  Founding a repressive peace on a lie was patronising and condescending.  The people deserved more respect.  Gordon and Wayne, agents of a standard patrician comic book world in which an elite makes interventions for the "ordinaries" do not have sufficient radical courage to say it out loud. But once the truth is out, they are all the more liberated for it. 

The theme of questioning the morality of benevolent intervention is further echoed in the use of weaponry in the film.  Wayne/Lucius Fox have developed an array of high spec machines to protect Gotham, as well as buying up inventions that could be harmful, such as the Clean Slate programme that Selina Kyle covets.  They've even mothballed a potential clean energy source because it could be used for military purposes at great cost to their company, and to the horror of do-gooding entrepreneur/militant terrorist Miranda Tate.  But it's those very machines that are used by Bane/Talia to wreak havoc on Gotham, with a particularly superb scene in which Bane literally blasts through into Lucius Fox's so-called secret R&D warehouse from his own under-ground lair.  

A radical question raised by this is whether Batman is himself the true antihero of this movie.  If Wayne/Batman hadn't developed/amassed these tools, would Gotham have been put in such danger?  In other words, just as its better for Wayne to leave his Batman identity behind (whether through death or through a daring autopilot assisted escape to Tuscany), is it also better for Gotham that Batman has left? To paraphrase Monty Python, what have superheroes ever done for us?  This, of course, brings us back to the plot arc that sees Batman ultimately confront the new head of The League of Shadows, Talia al Ghul. The League is basically an elite force of warriors who assume that their elite status gives them the right to direct history so as to "restore balance".  We do well to remember that Wayne was also a member of the League, and while he rejected it, he has kept many of their assumptions about the strong intervening in the lives of the ordinary to put them back on the right track.  The only difference is that he is benevolent rather than malevolent.  The discussion reminds me a bit of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.  Maybe it's just bad to intervene whether with good or bad intentions.  Maybe freedom from crime - whether organised in the case of Gotham and the Dent Act - or individual in the case of Alex - is only legitimate if it is engineered by legitimate democratic means. 

The second major theme in the movie is ECONOMIC INEQUALITY. That theme is refracted in different ways by each of the three purported villians.  The trio of villains begins with Daggett - a caricature greedy capitalist bastard who wants to take over Wayne Enterprises.  He is utterly conventional in his view of society and inequality.  He takes it for granted that capitalism distributes material wealth unequally and will play whatever game is necessary to make sure he comes out on top.He never questions the ultimately sustainability of the social order in Gotham, even as he disrupts the social order in minor African nations. Daggett hires the catburgler, Selina Kyle, to steal Bruce Wayne's fingerprints so that he can place fictitious trades that bankrupt Wayne and force him from the board.  He also hires Bane - a super-strong mercenary associated with African coups and mythical stories of having escaped a hellish prison - to make the trades in at attack on the stock market. Of course, as history proves, capitalists who think they can control political zealots always lose control to them, and Bane quickly dispatches Daggett as casually as Daggett might initiate a mass lay-off.  

But Daggett's most significant hire, as far as I'm concerned, is his sidekick Stryver, played by the marvelous Burn Gorman (just watch him as Guppy in the BBC's recent Bleak House).  Stryver is to me the most authentic character in the whole movie - symbolic of most City workers I know, who do their jobs well, fulfil their briefs, never once questioning the morality of the entire system they are part of. They're the aggressively upwardly mobile investment banking analysts who perform their tasks with absolute efficiency and dexterity in bonus maximisation - meanwhile the economy is crashing down around their ears.  Stryver, clumsily named, symbolises that faith in the capitalist system, where if we all work that bit harder, get a better degree, kiss-ass for promotion, we too can ascend to the elite. 

Selina Kyle is a more conflicted villain. She portrays herself as a kind of Robin Hood, only robbing the rich to feed herself - never taking from people who can't afford it.  She is seen to have the most insight into the corrosive nature of extreme material inequality and is also, on a tangent, insightful about the impossibility of getting a clean slate in a digital world. There's a lot to like about her character, not least that the Nolan's have not written her as a typical quasi-comedic fetishistic sex-kitten.  She has clear purpose, no self-delusion, and provides the only "zingers" in the film.  And in a three-hour film that often feels ponderous, ill-paced, and ill-plotted, Selina's wit is a valuable commodity indeed. 

In the middle section of the film it is Bane who emerges as the true match for Batman and Wayne - with his militant anti-capitalist forced "liberation" of the masses inside their new prison-Gotham.  Wayne becomes financially, as well as physically crippled: Batman is intellectually and physically broken by Bane - the broken mask and broken back.  In that sense, Bane is (in this middle section at least) the complete inverse of The Joker.  The Joker was petrifying because had no back story, no motivation, no logic. How was one to negotiate with such a man? How was one to out-think him, when his every action was seemingly anarchic, random, impossible to predict?  By contrast, Bane is a rather conventional, if particularly well-armed left-wing militant, complete with almost anarchic redistribution of wealth and kangaroo courts trying the former elite.  A lot of the footage reminded me of documentaries and history books about the Russia after the 1917, with luxurious houses occupied by multiple families, arbitrary judgments - the revenge of the oppressed. Only Selina voices the fact that these are people too - these apartments used to belong to people.* 

The only thing that doesn't make since, given Bane's stated anti-capitalist popular protest, is the fact that he arms a device that will explode in five months no matter what.  There is a contradiction in his liberating the people only to destroy them which is unsatisfactorily resolved when we realise that he is really a stooge for Talia's nihilistic destruction. To that end, I felt that Bane's project, character and force as a super-villain had been blunted by turning him into, essentially, a pussy-whipped patsy.  All of which brings us nicely to what I perceive to be the major problems with the films narrative arcs, character development, plot twists and pacing.

NARRATIVE PROBLEMS

So here's my problem with THE DARK KNIGHT RISES: I didn't care. And I didn't care because there were too many characters doing too much stuff that was either illogical or unearned.  Let's start with Bruce Wayne.  Wayne starts as a broken man, mourning for the future he could have had with Rachel Dawes.  He meets earnest entrepreneur Miranda Tate at a charity ball, then she comes to his house, and within about three lines of dialogue he tumbles into bed with her, despite the whole Rachel-brooding-thing.  I didn't buy it.  And then Selina Kyle is suddenly magically in love with Bruce, just because he "believes in her", kissing him passionately before he flies off with a bomb.  We're meant to be massively moved by this but come on - when did this love triangle have time to be established?  When did we, as an audience, get time to buy into this? And when did Selina  and Bruce fall sufficiently in love to end up together in Tuscany?!  

I came to the end of the film with the strong impression that this would've been a far better movie if Miranda/Talia simply hadn't been a character. This would've prevented the inclusion of a forced rom-com cheesy, unearned love triangle. It would also not have undermined the logical purity of Bane's mission as well as cutting of his metaphorical balls. It just didn't sit right with me that this hulking intellect - the first real match for Wayne/Batman - would basically be a love-sick pup, although I acknowledge that his tears at the end could've been because his pain meds were cut off as the mask was ripped, rather than an emotional response to Talia/Miranda rehearsing her back story.

Next problem - why are we introduced to so many small characters who have no bearing on the plot, distract attention and bloat the run-time?  Do we really need to see Stryver pushed out onto the ice? Do we really need to see the Scarecrow sitting in judgment?  Do we really need to see Matthew Modine's incompetent cop turn coward?  Do we really need the little orphan Robin story - and what a completely obvious and facile plot twist THAT was -  for any reason other than as franchise-fodder for Warner Brothers? All of these digressions took time away from Gordon and Fox. I wanted to see more of Gordon suffering for his part in the Dent lie. I wanted to see more establishment of the Love Triangle storyline if that was indeed the direction they were going in.

Final problem, so many micro choices didn't make sense.  If you invent a massively powerful energy source you have to be an idiot not to realise that any power source can be used for good and evil.  Why act all surprised when some scientist creates the trigger?  And if you have all this stuff that's dangerous why not just destroy it. Why keep it hanging around just in case you might at some unspecified future date be able to use it safely.  How come Bruce Wayne can strap on a super knee brace and suddenly run around like everything's all okay? (As I'm recovering from a fractured ankle right now - that really rubbed me up the wrong way).  How come Bruce can reach peak physical fitness in one training montage and then hop, skip and jump back from Jodhpur to North America and penetrate a locked down island, all the while secretly plotting to fake his own death (and falling in love with Selina)?  You get my drift....

TECHNICAL PROBLEMS

Perhaps the best thing about THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is that it is technically accomplished.  Wally Pfister's IMAX photography is superb.  But there are still two problems. I hated Hans Zimmer's over-bearing score.  And I found Bane's mask problematic.  His speech was too indistinct and it unfairly turned Tom Hardy into a Vader parody.  Poor chap.

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is on global release.

*Of course, many commentators have drawn the obvious contemporary analogy between Bane's radical condemnation of capitalism and the Occupy Movement.  All I can say to that is that I respect the logic of Bane's argument, but I've  never seen anything like such a cogent programme from Occupy. 

ALICE IN WONDERLAND 3D - what is Tim Burton trying to say here?

My response to ALICE IN WONDERLAND 3D was much the same as my response to Tim Burton's Roald Dahl adaptation, CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY. The production design, costumes, and sheer visual imagery were wondrous to behold. But Tim Burton had made poor choices regarding the narrative structure, tone and very heart of the subject matter.

So let's go back to the beginning. This movie originates in the children's novels Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. The novels were written by Charles Dodgson, an Oxford mathematician, better known as Lewis Carroll. On one level, the novels fall into the category of nonsense literature, in the same vein as Edward Lear. When the little girl Alice chases a small white rabbit, clothed in a waistcoat, down a rabbit hole, she enters a world that is surreal, sometimes sinister and that defies narrative logic. Potions and mushrooms make you larger or smaller. Animals talk, have tea parties and smoke hookah pipes. There are riddles, logic puzzles and chess moves; wonderful explorations of mirror-ing, double-ing and mathematical concepts; satirical sketches of donnish Oxford life; references to the Wars of the Roses - but ultimately, it's all just one giant non sequitor. Anything can happen because anything can follow. For a little child, this is a wonderfully liberating, but also an extraordinarily frightening concept. (The same conflicting reaction is at the heart of the most sinister of all the very sinister late Victorian and early Edwardian childrens' novels - Peter Pan. To this day, I am shocked that this is marketed as a children's novel rather than as horror.)

The genius of the original illustrations by Tenniel was to capture that strangeness - at once captivating and repulsive. Alice with her dark eyes and obnoxious self-confidence - the stern Victorian politicians anthropomorphicised into baffling characters. Wonderland is a world where one can fear drowning in a sea of one's own tears and where power is abused by a series of tyrannical and clearly insane aristos. It's hardly Disney. Unless of course you are watching the bland saccharine Disney version of the film. As adaptations go, it was faithful in the superficial - the characters were all there as were the each of the famous scenes in the right order - but completely failed to capture the sheer oddness of the world. To that end, Jonathan Miller's BBC film is my adaptation of choice - he fully explores the concept that Wonderland is really Oxford and makes the characters there so very close to real people, Wonderland isn't "other" or "under" but sits alongside reality.

Given how dark and surreal the source material is, I would've thought that Tim Burton would've been the perfect director for ALICE IN WONDERLAND 3D. And as the publicity stills were released I got more and more excited. I loved the make-up for Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter - he looked like a psychedelic version of McAdder. Helena Bonham Carter's encephelatic head as what I thought was the Queen of Hearts looked superb. Matt Lucas, who I'll always think of as the baby on Shooting Stars, looked born to play Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee. And when you looked down the cast list you could see lots of high-class British character actors in the voice roles, from Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat to most surprisingly and perfectly Barbara Windsor as the Doormouse. Most wonderfully of all, I was longing to Crispin Glover - a fascinating but little seen actor - as the Knave of Hearts. I suppose my suspicions might have been aroused by the casting of Australian Mia Wasikowska as Alice - not on the grounds that she can't act - she makes a perfectly decent fist of her role - but because she isn't a child. So there was obviously some serious re-writing at hand. And then, with the very appearance of the Tweedles and the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) they were clearly conflating the two novels, most notably in the character that looks like the Queen of Hearts but is called the Red Queen.

The resulting film is a strange beast indeed, but in all the wrong ways. Script-writer Linda Woolverton (BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, MULAN, ALLADIN) has made Alice a teenager being pressured into marriage. She runs away from her fate and down the rabbithole, but refuses to believe that she has been there before, as a child, despite being haunted by recurring nightmares of talking caterpillars and smiling cats. When she reaches the Underland, which she had mistakenly called Wonderland, she finds a landscape of scorched earth, stormy skies and familiar characters suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. To echo LA Times reviewer, Kenneth Turan, the Mad Hatter's tea party seems to be set in a sort of ill-conceived Mordor and the Mad Hatter himself has lost his mind in reaction to the Red Queen's hostile take-over of Underland. When events get too much for him he trips into a pitch perfect Scottish accent, but this only serves to make him even more McAdderish! The loose plot sees Alice journey to the Red Queen's palace to capture the Vorpal Sword and free the Hatter. She then visits the White Queen and summons the courage to defeat the Jabberwocky on the frabjous day (calloo callay!) in a finale that would've mean more appropriate to LOTR.

Despite the lovely creations that are the Mad Hatter, the Red Queen and the lovely costumes for Alice, the movie feels rather dismal and flat. I suppose that can't be helped as this is a vanquished world, but somehow, that wasn't a problem for Narnia or Rohan. Alice is supposed to find herself but the transformation isn't particularly convincing. Back in the real world, the idea that she would then become a neo-feminist adventuress is ludicrous. I think the problem is that the movie shifts in tone rather abruptly. In the same scene, you'll have Johnny Depp playing it utterly straight as the traumatised hatter, but Anne Hathaway pastiching the idea of the pure, slightly unpractical, narcissistic White Queen, with her pure white dress but scarily black lips and nails. Both are fine, but do they belong in the same film? And the sheer ill-judgement of the 1980s dancing that the Hatter roles out in the penultimate scene defies description.

Overall, then, while I can see consistency of design, I didn't see a consistency of vision as to what this movie was really about and what it was trying to say. A fatal flaw, no matter how lovely the costumes. Burton refuses to let ALICE be a wonderfully nonsensical nonsequitor. He wants to give characters a back story and feeeeeelings. But at the same time, he doesn't take the time to actually explore them properly. Worst of all, with the exception of the rather lazy introduction of some real-world twins, nowhere do we see Alice's visions as subconscious reworkings of people she has seen in the real world.

Additional tags: Mia Wasikowska, Dariusz Wolski, Christopher Lee, Geraldine James, Tim Piggott-Smith, Frances de la Tour, Marton Csokas, Barbara Windsor, Leo Bill, Linda Woolverton.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND is on global release.

VALENTINE'S DAY - not entirely unwatchable

VALENTINE’S DAY is a romantic comedy along the lines of LOVE ACTUALLY – in which we follow a number of characters, all loosely connected, living in contemporary LA on Valentine’s Day. We have everything from a teenager trying to lose her virginity (Emma Roberts); to a serving officer home on leave (Julia Roberts); from a cynical “player” sports journalist (Jamie Foxx) to an old-romantic florist (Ashton Kutcher) and many many more besides.

It is easy to deride VALENTINE’S DAY. It is a movie that has been so carefully constructed in the Excel sheets of Hollywood producers that is feels about as real and alive as a frozen turkey twizzler. Every actor has been chosen for their essentially good looks and winning smile. Every character is broadly delineated as being wholesome and good and thus deserving of True Love or as being superficial and duplicitous and therefore only worthy of being Alone. It’s the sort of movie that pats itself on the back for being so liberal as to have a gay character but doesn’t have the balls to show him making out. There is no plot development that cannot be predicted well in advance and no satire that hasn’t had its rough edges smoothed down. It’s a movie so shiny and brightly coloured in makes LOVE ACTUALLY - with its depiction of at least two “good characters” who end up unloved at the end of it – seem spiky and socially aware.

Nonetheless, I can’t deny that I had a passably good time watching the film, in the same way that a can of coke is predictable, tasty at the time, but offers no nutritional value. In a rising tide of blandness, Queen Latifah delivers one truly superb line, Taylor Swift was surprisingly willing to play dumb, and Anne Hathaway is always good at pulling off vulnerability. As for the rest of the cast, there’s nothing to write home about. The only thing that really pissed me off was the gaff in the writing that had Bradley Cooper’s character flying coach on a fourteen hour flight when he’s rich enough to have a chauffeur-driven limousine. Please. That guy would’ve been safely ensconsed in his personal sleeper seat in Business rather than propping up Julia Robert’s dozing head.

VALENTINE'S DAY is on global release.

BRIDE WARS - not as bad as the reviewers are making out

BRIDE WARS is clearly a rather shamelessly commercial enterprise aiming solidly at the demographic that falls for schmaltzy formulaic rom-coms like MADE OF HONOUR and P.S.I LOVE YOU. The direction is pedestrian, the writing is mediocre, the clothes are lovely and the ending is entirely predictable. Kate Hudson is about the least convincing lawyer I've seen on screen. Anne Hathaway shows none of the nuance that powered her role in RACHEL GETTING MARRIED. Still, given the shit that has been thrown at the movie, I was pleasantly surprised by how watchable it was. I wouldn't want to watch it again, but it was a perfectly pleasant way to pass ninety minutes.

It may have sub-plots that deal with relationships with men, but the movie is really about female friendship. In its defense, the movie is pretty honest about the lamentable amount of pressure some women put on themselves to have a perfect wedding and the competitiveness and neuroses that underlie some friendships. When the two lead characters, Liv and Emma (Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway) attend a third girlfriend's wedding, as happy as they are for her, they can't resist making digs about the floral arrangements. And when Liv and Emma announce that they are getting married, their other girlfriends hit the ice-cream and anti-depressants, worried that they're falling behind the curve. Finally, when a mix-up by the wedding planner (Candice Bergen) means that Liv and Emma have to get married on the same day at same hotel, neither wants to back down. Each firmly believes that she should have her day in the spotlight.

What then unfolds is a rather unedifying series of sabotage plots until everything goes so far that the two girls realise what we knew all along: it simply isn't worth it.But for all that, Kate Hudson is very watchable as high-achieving, competitive Liv, and her character actually develops as the movie unfolds. I actually rather like Kate Hudson as a light comedic actress. Anne Hathaway is a bit more anonymous as passive-aggressive Emma but Kristen Johnston (3rd ROCK FROM THE SUN) provides some genuine laugh-out-loud moments as Emma's egotistical maid of honour.

BRIDE WARS is on release in the UK, US and Turkey. It opens next week in Australia, Spain and Sweden and on January 22nd in Singapore and Estonia. It opens on January 29th in Hungary; on February 5th in Argentina, Croatia, Germany and Brazil; on February 11th in Belgium, France, Portugal and Norway; on February 20th in Finland and Italy; on February 26th in Russia and the Netherlands and on April 2nd in the Czech Republic.

London Film Festival Day 16 - RACHEL GETTING MARRIED

RACHEL GETTING MARRIED is in that sub-genre of indie movies that does family dysfunction. Think THE SQUID AND THE WHALE or MARGOT AT THE WEDDING. Think of a middle-class American family gathering for a big occasion, being truly horrific to each other until, hey, they all realise that they are family and they love each other, thus making the first hour's histrionics seem a bit pointless. All this in played out against the background of perhaps the most forced politically correct wedding in cinema history - moreover, in a movie where director Jonathan Demme seems far more interested in the outstanding score that in the narrative arc. He's more wedding planner than engaged director in this film. Nonetheless, the movie is worth seeing for Anne Hathaway's raw performance as recovering junkie, Kym, who is reinserted into family life for her sister Rachel's wedding. Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) resents the fact that Kym is the centre of attention - Kym resents everyone judging her. The arguments between Kym and Rachel build to an almost unbearable crescendo. It's a shame that it all disintegrates into an extended world music video.

RACHEL GETTING MARRIED played Venice, Toronto and London 2008. It is currently on release in the US. It opens in Germany on March 26th, in Belgium on April 22nd, and in the Netherlands on April 30th.

GET SMART - mis-fire

GET SMART is a big-budget Hollywood remake of the old US TV series in which a clutz secret agent called Maxwell Smart was helped by his beautiful, competent, partner, Agent 99. In this new version, the writers decided to make Smart actually quite clever, and a decent, charming guy to boot. Agent 99 is also a little softer round the edges and despite the wide age difference between the actors - Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway - they actually have good chemistry. I like that Smart and Agent 99 are a better match for each other and bought into their relationship. Sadly, everything around that central relationship is pretty weak, ripping on Bond movies and ENTRAPMENT. The plot is thin, and aside from location work in Russia, it's all very pedestrian. Alan Arkin and Hiro from HEROES are wasted in small roles, and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson needs to progress beyond this material. On the whole, one for DVD at best.

GET SMART was released in June in Bolivia, Chile, Greece, Peru, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Brazil, India, Panama, Taiwan, the US, Argentina, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela. It was released in July in Italy, Kuwait, Estonia, Romania, Austria, Germany, Russia, Spain and Hong Kong. GET SMART is currently on release in Hong Kong, Portugal, Egypt, Iceland, Israel, the Netherlands, Hungary and the UK. It goes on release next weekend in Croatia, Denmark, Finland and Sweden. It opens in September in Belgium, Norway, France and Japan.

BECOMING JANE - lacking in wit, passion or style

BECOMING JANE is a flimsy little costume drama that shamelessly cashes in on the Jane Austen fanbase and has far too little wit, character, plot, intelligence or style to sustain its 120 minute run time.

I say this as an impartial observer. I am not one of those rabid Austen fans who resents an American lead actress (Anne Hathaway - accent and performance both fine by me.) I am rather intrigued by the idea that Austen's novels found a base in a thwarted love affair with a gallant but impoverished Irish lawyer (James McAvoy in yet another charming role). I have also read and re-read all Austen's novels - an essential prerequisite to watchng this film. For BECOMING JANE panders to people like me who can recognise protypes of famous characters in Jane's family, friends and suitors. But after a while this becomes a rather lazy means to engage our interest and I despair for any viewers who don't even have the background hum of recognition to fall back on.

We watch a young Jane feel affronted by an arrogant Lefroy at a ball, before falling in love with the one person who takes her writing seriously. The obstacle to the match is their poverty: each must marry well. The screenwriters - Kevin Hood and Sarah Williams - try to conjure a little excitement with an elopment - but it feels like what it is: padding.

In the end, we are left with the fact that Jane Austen wrote a couple of marvellous novels, but lived a rather quiet life that was clearly insufficient in excitement to fill a film. Worst of all, the simplistic structure and banal dialogue of BECOMING JANE look all the more mediocre when the film is constantly referring our attention to the superior art of Austen.

BECOMING JANE is on release in the UK. It opens in Australia on March 29th, in Sweden on March 30th, in Finland on June 29th, in the US on August 3rd, in the Netherlands on August 16th, in Norway on September 14th, in Germany on October 4th and in Spain on October 19th.

HOODWINKED! - it's better than bad: it's good!

HOODWINKED! is a wiity, clever, new animated movie that spoofs the Little Red Riding Hood story. It comes jam-packed with movie and TV references and takes the mickey out of lots of musical styles and film genres - from xXx to MI2 to film noir. The biggest wink to the audience comes in the complex narrative structure. Instead of the linear story-telling one might expect from a kids film we have a RASHOMON style structure. As the movie opens, "Red" has entered granny's cottage to find the wolf in disguise. Into the mix dives a psychotic axe-weilding wood-cutter. Soon the police have arrived, cordoned off the area and have the four suspects in custody. Because the real beef is that a thief is running around the Deep Dark Forest stealing all the cookie recipes and putting small independent cookie makers out of business. The movie shows us the events of the fatefull night from the point of view of each of the four suspects - each time building up a trail of evidence to the real Baddie.

The animation is a lot of fun with plenty of detail for those of you who will be suckered into repeated viewings on DVD with the kids. And the voice cast does just fine - notably featuring Anne Hathaway as "Red" and Glenn Close as the Granny. But the real market for this movie is not the under-tens - they'll find some of the characters fun but aren't going to stick with the convoluted plot. The people who will enjoy this movie are the kind of people who love Ren and Stimpy and wander through the Marienplatz singing The Log song*. (Yes, Gibbons, that means you!) Because the best of the humour is definitely in The Log song tradition, not least the Schnitzel song.

So, is this a recommendable kids flick? Probably not. But if you have a bunch of friends who love to quote movies and watch the Cartoon Network well into their twenties, then this is a fun movie to go see.

HOODWINKED! opened in the US at the end of 2005 and has since opened around the world, finishing up in the UK last week and finally rolling into Brazil next week and in Germany in December 2006. HOODWINKED! is available on Region 1 DVD. *What rolls down stairs alone or in pairs, rolls over your neighbor's dog? What's great for a snack and fits on your back? It's Log, Log, Log! It's Log, Log, it's big, it's heavy, it's wood. It's Log, Log, it's better than bad, it's good! Everyone wants a log! You're gonna love it, Log! Come on and get your log! Everyone needs a Log!

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA - infuriating

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA started life as an infuriatingly trite novel by Lauren Weisberger documenting her trials as assistant to Anna "Nuclear" Wintour - editor of American Vogue. The novel no doubt filled the vacuum in the heart of thirteen year-old girls who dream of one day owning a Gucci handbag all of their very own. Accordingly it sold in bucket loads. I found the novel to be infuriating. The heroine is a whiny wannabe journalist who thinks she is above fashion journalism but it just as cut-throat and get-ahead as the rest of us. Her nemesis - the she-devil boss of the title is merely a string of cutting one-liners and seemingly sadistic demands. Admittedly, Weisberger lets her heroine fall from grace. But the plot machinations are so melodramatic as to be ludicrous and the ultimate message is not that you should work hard at something worthwhile, but that you should screw everyone, write a book, make a killing and thus clamber back onto your high horse.

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA the movie is similarly trite, except it doesn't even have the balls to convey a proper rise-fall-redemption arc. The heroine's primary-school teacher geek boyfriend becomes a cool, crumped chef in the Village. Her best friends are more together and her family less emotionally blackmailing. Oh, it goes in all sorts of small ways - the heroine of the movie is allowed to succeed in ways that the heroine of the novel is not.

The only change for the better in the movie is that the screenwriters have taken great pains to make Meryl Streep's evil boss humane. My god, she even cries! Well, I wonder if this was a genuine decision on how to improve the plot or whether they just decided that Meryl does a good break-down. (Didn't they do the same thing in THE HOURS - giving Meryl a break-down that her gay friend had in the novel?) Seriously though, Meryl Streep gives a fantastic performance that just about elevates this post-Sex and the City trash into watchable - maybe even entertaining - material. She is ably assisted in this task by Stanley Tucci and Emily Blunt who both turn in decent comedic performances. As for our heroine, played by Anne Hathaway, I am on record as saying that I really like Hathaway as an actress, but I wish she would do more work that challenged her.

Other than that, this is a pretty sloppy affair. High gloss for sure, but sloppily thought out. What's their message? That it's impossible for a woman to have a family and a career? That a woman has to be bitchy and back-stabbing to survive in the corporate world? What kind of crap is this? It's also pretty sloppy in the editing. There is an exchange between our heroine and a seductor on the steps of a museum after a benefit that clearly refers to a conversation that has been excised.

So, all in all, this movie is pretty unedifying. In fact, the message of the film is fairly discouraging and would dismay any genuine career woman. Yes, yes, Meryl Streep is fantastic, but that doesn't quite stop this from being a deeply infuriating cinematic experience.

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA is already on release in the US, Puerto Rico, the, Philippines, Singapore, Israel and Hong Kong. It opens in Brazil, Denmark, France, Argentina, Australia and Thailand in September. It opens in Italy, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, Slovenia, the UK, Finland, Latvia, Spain, Turkey and the Ukraine on October 5th. It opens in Germany, Greece and the Netherlands on October 12th and in Iceland, Sweden, Belgium, Estonia later that month. Finally, it opens in Lithuania, Egypt and Japan in November.

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN - Visually stunning love story

Hollywood loves love stories. Take a look at your local cineplex and you'll find romantic comedies, a movie about a love affair between a ten-ton gorilla and a blonde chick, and even a romance between a landscape gardener and a coma victim. But up until Brokeback Mountain, we have never had a honest-to-goodness love story between a gay couple.* So, even if this film weren't any good, there would be a good chance of it getting recognised by the Academy on pure political correctness grounds. It is one of the many paradoxes in Hollywood: studio executives balk from financing ground-breaking dramas that tackle prejudice head-on. Instead, they pile money into sure-fire cash-earning gun-and-titty movies. However, when it comes to casting their votes for the Oscars, time and time again they vote for the very same "brave", "arty" movies.

Anyways, political correctness aside, Brokeback Mountain is among a handful of films that have made 2005 a vintage year for cinema. The movie tells the story of a twenty-year love affair between two cowboys, who cannot reveal their love for fear of violent reprisals. Unlike the heavy-handed movies, The Constant Gardener and Good Night and Good Luck, Brokeback Mountain does not force its profundity onto the viewer. It tells an evocative story and allows the wider implications to resonate with the viewer rather than hitting us over the head with a civics lesson.

Two things should be noted about this movie. First, the breathtaking photography of Brokeback Mountain itself. The movie was shot by the Mexican cinematographer Rodrigo Prierto. He has shot a string of fantastic movies, including Amores Perros, Frida, 8 Mile, 25th Hour, 21 Grams and Alexander and surely deserves an Oscar for Brokeback. The second notable feature of this movie is the wonderful performance by Heath Ledger as Ennis Delmar, the shy and naive cowboy who is initiated into homosexuality by Jake Gyllenhaal. With this perfomance, Ledger has declared himself one of the finest actors of his generation.

The only real flaw I can find with Brokeback, and it is a flaw, is the somewhat weak performance of the "other" cowboy. Jake Gyllenhaal leapt to fame in cult-hit Donnie Darko and since then has been, well, underwhelming in mediocre flicks such as The Day After Tomorrow, Jarhead and Proof. In those cases, I assumed that bad directors had failed to extract his talent, but in this case there is less excuse. Where Gyllenhaal's accent fluctuates and his acting looks mannered and obvious, Ledger is a study in subsuming the self to the role. If Gyllenhaal's acting, or lack thereof, prevents Brokeback from being a truly great movie, it is nonetheless a very good one. I urge you to go see it and if possible, on the biggest screen you can find.

Brokeback Mountain premiered at Venice, and has since gone on nationwide release in the US and on limited release in the UK. It goes on general release in the UK on the 13th January 2006, in France on the 18th January and in Germany on the 9th March.

*The cinephiles among you will point to the Oscar-winning drama, Boys Don't Cry, which featured a romance between a straight girl and another girl who pretended to be a boy. I think this doesn't count not because of the sexual niceties of what was going on but because Boys Don't Cry was more political drama than simple love story. In other words, there was far more screen time awarded to beating up the "freak" than to the relationship between the two girls.

The Annie Proulx short story on which Brokeback Mountain was based can be found, in full, here.