Random DVD Round-Up 2 - SEX AND THE CITY 2

I didn't hate SEX AND THE CITY 2 as much as I thought I would, but then again, my expectations were very low indeed. I'd never been a fan of the series. I didn't relate to a bunch of women defined by their conspicuous consumption of luxury goods or the apparent contradiction of wanting to be both sexually liberated AND pining for a rich husband. The show, and indeed the first movie, wanted to both have its cake and eat it, and was expressed with a vulgarity of tone, and shameless excess that seemed to undercut its wannabe-serious political agenda.

Fast forward to 2010 and the release of SEX AND THE CITY 2, and the franchise's crass vulgarity has been amped up even more than I thought possible, simply by transferring the four most egregiously consumerist girls in the US to the most egregiously consumerist nation on earth, the UAE. The resulting film feels like a 2 hour info-mercial advertising Abu Dhabi as a vacation resort just so long as you don't want kiss in public, and of course, conditional on you having $22,000 a night for a suite. The plot is the same-old bullshit we got on the TV show: privileged women whining about how tough life is. Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), the lawyer, is angry because her male boss dismisses her. Rather than deal with it maturely, she just quits. This is meant to be seen as a victory. Charlotte (Kristin Davis), having sweated spinal fluid to catch a rich husband and have two children, is tired and pissed off with being a mother, despite the fact that she has full-time help. Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) is angry her husband is, well, old, and wants to stay in, and when her book gets a bad review, kisses an ex- in a fit of pique. Her husband's reaction to this is just plain unbelievable. And finally, Kim Cattrall is eating hormones to stave off the menopause, and angry she can't fuck anyone she wants in public in a Muslim country.

Now, there are some moments when the movie feels vaguely interesting. I mean, it's nice to see women actually speaking openly about menopause and hot flashes. And yes, being a mother to small kids is hard. But the movie consistently fails to make itself relatable beyond this. There are few casual sentences referring to the awful economy, or congratulating mothers who survive without help, but when uttered by women in a $22,000 a night suite, it just feels condescending - as condescending as Carrie tipping her Indian butler so that he can fly home and visit his wife.

I guess it must sound like I'm criticising the movie less than criticising the lifestyle of the characters, but in a franchise that sells a lifestyle choice, I think that's fair game. But even if I bought into its lifestyle, would I like the movie? Nope. Because even on its own terms, it fails. The fashion is not fabulous but looks horrid. The women don't look wonderful in their middle age, but haggard and trying to hard. The shooting style is pedestrian and the direction workmanlike at best. And just what was that Liza Minelli song and dance number? Did they take her face and morph it onto a different body? It just looked plain weird.

SEX AND THE CITY 2 opened in summer 2010 and is now available to rent and buy.

THE WOLFMAN - anaemic

Joe Johnston, hack director of such memorable fare as HIDALGO, JURASSIC PARK III and THE ROCKETEER (oh yes!) creates another cine-clunker with his ill-conceived remake of the Curt Siodomak classic, THE WOLF MAN.

The story is simple. Innocent Lawrence Talbot is bitten by a werewolf on Blackmoor while investigating his brother's savage death. He has to fight to stop the beast, while battling with his own lycophagia, all the time being hounded by the police and the psychiatrists, and with the help of his brother's attractive fiancée, Gwen.

Neither gory enough to be convincing as horror, nor well-acted enough to be convincing as familial drama, the movie occasionally plays as a campy spoof. It's surprising to me that the production design is so hi-rent - with richly textured costumes, and decadent gothic sets. And yet, the make-up design for The Wolfman is distinctly unconvincing, running a close second to Ang Lee's bouncing luminous green HULK as the most implausible filmic creation. You watch the sub-par transformation scenes, and the Teen-Wolf-laughable Wolfman bounding across London and you're taken out of the movie immediately. And as for the acting, despite the high quality cast (Anthony Hopkins, Geraldine Chaplin, Benicio del Toro, Emily Blunt, Antony Sher), the performances seem flat and uninspired. Only Hugo Weaving, as a mis-placed Inspector Abberline, looks like he's having any fun at all.

What a waste of a fine cast. What a waste of the beautifully decorated sets, period costumes, and lush Danny Elfman score. What a waste of my time and money.

Additional tags: Joe Johnston

THE WOLF MAN is on global release in all bar Russia, Australia and Poland where it opens next weekend, Israel where it opens on April 1st and Japan where it opens on April 23rd.

London Film Festival Day 3 - DEAN SPANLEY

DEAN SPANLEY is a beautifully acted and cleverly written costume drama about coming to terms with grief and re-establishing familial relations. Peter O'Toole plays an Edwardian stick-in-the-mud who refuses to mourn his elder son's death in the Boer War. The subsequent death of his wife, which his younger son (Jeremy Northam) partly blames him for, reduces their relationship to one of cynical mocking on the part of Fisk Senior and deferential routine on the part of Fisk Junior.

This stagnant relationship is transformed when Fisk Junior cultivates a friendship with an eccentric clergyman called Dean Spanley (Sam Neil). The Dean apparently believes in reincarnation and, when plied with a rare Hungarian digestif, will unconsciously drift into his past life. The skill of DEAN SPANLEY is that its subject matter is patently absurd and yet the poker straight performance of Sam Neil in the title role and the reactions from Northam and O'Toole completely sell it to us. However the fact that the film takes so long to patiently create a credible platform for the final revelation makes the first hour of this film desperately slow moving, and does rather call into question whether the final emotional pay-off was worth the wait.

DEAN SPANLEY played Toronto and London 2008.

London Film Festival Day 2 - FRANKLYN

FRANKLYN is the debut feature from British writer-director Gerald McMorrow. It's a movie about the delayed impact of emotional trauma on three people living in contemporary London - a suicidal video artist (Eva Green); a jilted lover (Sam Riley) and an Iraqi war vet. The first half of the movie shows the three characters failing to cling to reality and plays their fantasy worlds as reality, not least in a gothic "Meanwhile City" where a Ministry sanctions a multitude of religious cults and a masked vigilante rails against who knows what.

The scenes in the real world have a certain satisfaction insofar as they are well-acted by a strong cast and pack an emotional punch. But I feel that McMorrow has failed to tie together the real and fantasy strands of his film. Despite the portentious voiceover from Ryan Philippe's vigilante, we are given precious little information. At first, I thought this was being the movie was baiting the audience and would reveal a richness of interlocking later on. Actually, when we figure out what's happening, which isn't hard to do, it's all a bit thin and bathetic.

So, I have to say that FRANKLYN was a rather disappointing and unsatisfying experience - setting up a complex interlocking world but failing to deliver. On the positive side, I loved the way McMorrow placed and moved his camera and I definitely liked the GORMENGHAST meets BEETLEJUICE fantasy world production design. But, in the final analysis, the lack of narrative coherence (and the similarity of the vigilante outfit to Rorschach) let the movie down.

FRANKLYN played London 2008 and opens in the UK on January 30th 2009.

DVD round-up 3: NINA'S HEAVENLY DELIGHTS*

It says a lot for the advance and acceptance of the gay rights cause that we can now have queer cinema that's as formualic, trite, saccharine and basically piss-poor as your average Richard Curtis flick. The Nina of the title is an Asian twenty-something lesbian who left her family back in Glasgow. She returns for her father's funeral to learn that he gambled away the family restaurent. Her only hope is to win a televised national cooking contest. The movie wears its PC credentials on its sleeve: there's an Asian kid-sister who yearns to be a highland dancer, a Bollywood-aspirant transvestite, and of course the central Asian-Scottish lesbian love affair. The dialogue and love scenes are stilted and awkward, the humour weak and sporadic, and the denouement as ridiculous as that of NOTTING HILL. The acting - from a largely unknown cast of Brits - is uniformly wooden. The most shocking thing is that this glib rom-com was penned by Andrea Gibb, the writer behind the infinitely more challenging and mature Scottish drama, DEAR FRANKIE.

NINA'S HEAVENLY DELIGHTS opened in the UK in November 2006 and opens in the US in November 2007. It is available on DVD.