BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE**

Director Tim Burton has set himself a high bar in making a sequel to his beloved black comedy BEETLEJUICE. It was a film that blended live action and animation - a heartbreakingly wholesome couple and a ghoulishly dysfunctional family - macabre jokes about suicide and an iconic possession sequence set to Harry Belafonte. How do you top the inventiveness, the zaniness and the hilarity of Michael Keaton's titular performance? How do you make us love characters in the way that we loved Lydia Deetz and wanted to protect her just as the Maitlands did?

Sadly, except for a couple of flashes of brilliance, the sequel fails to live up to the original. We waste a good half hour simply catching up with characters and it must be 45 minutes before The Juice Is Loose.  Over thirty years have passed.  Lydia (Winona Ryder) is now a schlocky TV presenter with an oleaginous TV producer love interest (Justin Theroux). Her stepmother Delia (Catherine O'Hara) is now fantastically successful as an artist, but in mourning for her beloved Charles. Delia and Lydia have made a kind of peace since the original film, but Lydia now has problems with her own teenage daughter (Jenna Ortega).  The family gathers at the original house for Charles' funeral. Shenanigans ensue.

What's to love?  Michael Keaton, underused, but fantastic. Monica Belucci and Danny DeVito criminally underused.  Catherine O'Hara's occasional killer line, especially playing off Justin Theroux.  A fantastic flashback played as a foreign-language black-and-white melodrama. A brilliantly funny use of Richard Marx' Right Here Waiting. But too much of it was plodding through character catch-ups. Not enough of it was funny. Are we really surprised by the silly sandworms as deus ex machina? No. There are no stakes. There are no feelings. What's it for?

BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 104 minutes. It played Venice and is on global release today.

This is not a review of WHITE NOISE - BFI London Film Festival 2022 - Day 2

Noah Baumbach's adaptation of the Don DeLillo academic / western proseperity satire is mystifyingly opaque and uninvolving. We are presented with a central couple that are spoiled, self-involved and unlikeable. The dad is an ego-driven college professor who teaches Hitler studies but can't speak German. He's married to a woman, Babette, who is numbing herself to the inevitability of death with pills. They have a gaggle of precocious kids who all seem to be obsessed with death and calamity while all the while being surrounded by the detritus of American consumerism and endless layers of meaningless conversation and noise. There's no-one to like. That's probably the point. But then it makes it harder to care about their reactions to the Airborne Toxic Event that happens when a lorry crashes near their home town.  They're evacuated. The dad is exposed to toxins. Or is he? Is the evacuation real or a simulation or a simulation that takes advantage of real events?

It's all very clever but I feel reality has moved beyond what this movie was satirising in the mid 80s.  Academia is now so far up its meta-textual Critical Theorised arse that the de-contextualised lecture duel between Driver's Hitler professor and Don Cheadle's Elvis obsessive seems pale meat compared to the BS that actually takes place now. (I should explain I am academe-adjacent IRL).  

And yes, the film is making a point about late-stage capitalism and misinformation and misdirection but I feel that in a post-Trump world this is all stuff we a) know and b) get bigger darker laughs from on the Colbert Late Show each night.

So I walked out after an hour.

WHITE NOISE has a running time of 137 minutes. It played the Venice and BFI London Film Festivals and will be released on Netflix on December 30th.

SCORE: A FILM MUSIC DOCUMENTARY

One of the most wonderful experiences of attending the San Francisco film festival was watching this fascinating film about film music in one of the theatres at the Dolby Laboratories - experiencing a visual and audio quality rarely seen in a commercial cinema. To be sure, this documentary didn't really warrant a screen that would've done a big budget action movie justice, but the sound quality was much desired.  Over 90 minutes, the film-makers give us an amazing insight into the history and current state of composing for film, including a quite dazzling access to composers including the pre-eminent Hans Zimmer.

The impression one gets is that movie composition has changed from writing and conducting a traditional orchestral score to something more akin to a polymath enterprise - creative originality; running a vast team of people; and enough IT knowledge to produce the music.  It's the middle part of that that really surprised me - these composers are essentially front-men for a team that includes people who will supplement their creative work, produce scores, and sometimes conduct so that they can be in the mixing booth ensuring the overall mix of the work produced.  And now they are supplemented by a new breed of conventional rock star turned composer bringing a new feel to the scores they create.

THE END OF THE TOUR - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Ten

THE END OF THE TOUR is a deceptively simple movie.  It chronicles the five days that Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky spent interviewing the famous writer David Foster Wallace at the end of Wallace's book tour for his novel, Infinite Jest.  I was a bit nervous walking into the screening because I haven't read any of Wallace's work, and only vaguely new the story of his depression and eventual suicide.  Also, I was a bit nervous that the two Davids were being played by Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg respectively.  Not that I don't think they're good actors. It's just that they tend to play the same sort of characters all the time. Siegel in particular tends to go for those big loveable man-child comedy characters and I was wondering if he could play a quieter, more intellectual, more complex character and actually disappear into the role.

Well, my fears were utterly overturned by what is a subtle, quiet, nuanced performance that truly shows Segel's range. This is his film.  

AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON

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

Joss Whedon had an almost impossible task to pull of in his AVENGERS sequel.  He had to give enough time to the storylines and character arcs of all the major superheroes we've come to know and love in the increasingly complex Marvel Cinematic Universe.  He had to also make room for new additions - not one, but three bad guys, and a nebulous almost a-ethical good guy.  He had to create enough CGI heavy wow moments of action and stunts. But he also had to give the movie heart. And all this in just over two hours.

FIFTY SHADES OF GREY

The lead actors & director at the Berlin Film Festival.

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

So if you've read the middle-class middle-aged woman soft-porn fanfic that is FIFTY SHADES OF GREY your expectations for the movie are probably not high. Especially when you realise that the novelist, E L James, was very controlling (!) as to the adaptation, insisting on things like banal little email exchanges being kept verbatim.  And once you note that it has an R rating, which means that the studio has effectively cut the balls off the already fairly mild sex scenes, one wonders what's left to play for.

BIG EYES

BIG EYES is a well-acted biopic starring Amy Adams as Margaret Keane, whose husband Walter (Christoph Waltz) passed off her phenomenally popular if schmaltzy portraits of big-eyed kids as his own  throughout the 1950s and 1960s.  Finally she struck up the courage to leave him and then to sue him, proving beyond doubt she was the artist when the judge asked them both to create one  of the iconic pictures. This story is retold by Tim Burton in one of his least Burton-esque pictures. It doesn't star his typical actors and doesn't have his typical trademark gothic style.  That's actually a good thing, because this is a great and claustrophobic story about a woman suckered into a lie by a good liar, and suffocated by the consequences. All you need to do is cast two good actors, stand back, and let them do their thing. And this is exactly what happens.  Christoph Waltz is perfectly cast as Walter. He's charming and his energy wraps you up and makes it convincing that a good, if shy woman could be carried along on the crest of a wave and not realise she had imprisoned herself before it was too late.  And Amy Adams has that amazing mix of vulnerability of strength so that both her complicity and then her escape feel authentic. In a sense,this is a story of a abusive marriage.  There's no beating or drinking but that tell-tale symptom - a loss of self, vanishing into oneself - is there. Apart from the beautifully enacted drama, what else is there? One trademark flash of Burtonism - a spooky gothic nightmare in which everyone Margaret meets has her big eyes - and pointed cameos from Terence Stamp as an unimpressed art critic and Jason Schwartzman as a jealous gallery owner.

BIG EYES has a running time of 106 minutes and is rated PG-13.  BIG EYES is on release in the USA, Spain, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Taiwan, Greece, Italy, Poland, Hong Kong, India and Latvia. It opens on January 15th in Israel, Malaysia, Russia, Estonia and Romania; on January 23rd in Japan; on Japan 29th in Brazil, Singapore and Iceland; on February 5th in Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Lithuania; on February 12th in Iraq and Kuwait; on February 19th in Hungary; on February 25th in Philippines, Portugal and Croatia; on March 5th in Denmark, Mexico, Sweden and Turkey; on March 12th in Chile, Peru and Finland; on March 18th in Belgium and France; on March 27th in Norway; on April 16th in Argentina; on April 23rd in Germany and on July 24th in Venezuela. 

AMERICAN HUSTLE

AMERICAN HUSTLE has swagger and style and enough hairspray to raise the Titanic. It has whizz bang energy and crazy characters high on their own con. There are times when it's outlandish hype slips into self-conscious kitsch - times when the performances are so balls-deep in crazy you wonder if the movie has just become BAD, but it's so fun, so bizarre, so outlandish you can't help but stick with it. 

So what's the skinny?  AMERICAN HUSTLE is a very loose retelling of the Abscam scandal of the late 1970s - an FBI sting operation that spiralled out of control, eventually targeting US senators and congressmen with a fake Arab sheikh offering cash for a passport.  The whole thing was murky as hell.  I mean, the guys took the bribes, but this was entrapment and selection of targets as an artform.   In this version of the story, the original conmen are Irving Rosenfeld, played by Christian Bale, and his partner Sydney, played by Amy Adams. They're caught on a small time charge by FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), who gets so glamoured by their lifestyle that he decides to become part of the con, using them to entrap politicians.  Key among them is a New Jersey mayor, Carmine Polito - a mobbed up man, to be sure, but one who genuinely speaks from the heart when he says he wants to use the fake Sheikh's money to reinvigorate his home town.

Director David O Russell is far less concerned with the technicalities of the plot and the con than with the characters and their conscious and subconscious motivations. This is absolutely right.  And ironic.  In a movie so concerned with surface - the hairstyles, the clothes, the moves - there is no superficiality.  When a character extravagantly combs over his hair, or creates a tight perm, or wears a dress cut to the navel - they're becoming a character and the whole point of the movie is to watch them reimagine themselves as they'd like to be. So when the movie becomes a cheap melodrama, that's maybe because that's how these characters see themselves - as the stars of their own C-list caper movie.

Another delicious irony - the most honest man in the film is the original conman, Irving Rosenfeld.  And when I say honest, what I mean in the context of a film about self-delusion is that Irving is totally self-aware.  He knows he's a schlubby conman.  He knows he's going to be ensnared by his manipulative wife forever. And he knows he can stay safe by staying small, and not letting greed get the better of him. He's even self-aware about his weakness - his need to disguise his baldness.  This gives Irving a kind of wisdom and humanity that's lacking in the other, almost universally more narcissistic characters.  He's fully aware that Carmine Polito is a good man dirtying his hands to do good works, and is the only character who shows any kind of moral courage in warning him off.  There's a kind of brilliance in Bale's understated performance - the flash of knowledge that passes across his face as he acknowledges that DiMaso is out of control and makes the call to effectively switch sides.  And, yes, I see the added irony of calling Bale's performance subtle. But it is. Under the weight gain, and the combover, and the velvet wide-lapel suits, it's a great subtle performance. 

By contrast, we have Brad Cooper in appropriately manic mode as Richie DiMaso, the henpecked mama's boy who sees the glamorous "Lady Edith" (Sydney's con character) as his ticket to reinvention as a kind of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, super-cool, super-macho, big-time PLAYA. He over-reaches in a way that Irving never would - to Lady Edith - to Senators - and his tragedy is that unlike Irving he really can't handle reality. 

Irving's wife Rosalyn is as deluded as Richie but to gloriously comic effect. She's a young single mother so fortunate as to have Irving provide and adopt her son.  But in her mind, she's always in the right, always responsible for the good things, never responsible for the bad, and a star in her own universe.  Jennifer Lawrence is so unbelievably hilarious and captivating in her few scenes that she threatens to unbalance the movie just as she unhinges the con, and if her Oscar nomination last year was generous, this year it will be thoroughly deserved. 

Sadly, Lawrence's incadescent Rosalyn put Amy Adams "Lady Edith" in the shade.  Adams, cast against time as the vamp, just can't carry off the super sexy outfits and in the inevitable final act confrontation between Irving's lover and his wife, it's Rosalyn/Lawrence who comes out triumphantly on top.  In fact, they seem to be in different films - and maybe that's the point.  Adams/Edith is playing in a romantic tragedy whereas Lawrence/Rosalyn is in a lurid supersexy melodrama. Adams has the  emotional crisis, but Lawrence has all the fun. 

All the way through watching AMERICAN HUSTLE I felt like I was right on the edge where so bad it's good becomes just bad.  But the more I think about it, the more I think that's the point. These characters are all, more or less, actors, hustlers, putting a con on themselves and us. Some do it better than others.  And David O Russell has made a movie that isn't so much his take on the Abscam scandal, as a patchwork of all these hustlers own perceptions of their con.   Maybe I'm being generous. And if I'm wrong, there are times when the performances and the direction in this film are so broad and pastichey and kitschy they are bad.  But if I'm right, then this is a film working on a meta levels of brilliance while all the time being entertaining in the most basic of ways. 

AMERICAN HUSTLE has a running time of 138 minutes and is rated R in the USA and 12A in the UK.

AMERICAN HUSTLE is on limited release in the USA and Australia. It opens on December 20th wide in the USA and in the UK. It opens on December 26th in Israel, Singapore and Vietnam; on December 31st in Taiwan; on January 1st in the UK and Italy; on January 2nd in Lebanon; on January 9th in Greece; on January 17th in Romania; on January 23rd in Argentina, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Portugal, Serbia and Turkey; on January 31st in Japan; on February 5th in France; on February 7th in Brazil and India; on February 12th in Belgium and Germany; on February 21st in Finland and Sweden and on March 20th in the Netherlands. 

OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL

Sam Raimi's prequel to the WIZARD OF OZ is a movie in which I can see so much to admire but which bored me for all of its overlong two hour ten minute runtime.  

I loved the visual design of the black and white prologue in a turn of the century Kansas carnival, where our anti-hero conman, conjurer and lothario, Oz, escapes an angry husband by taking off in a hot air balloon that will whisk him to a land of his subconscious that he has narcissistically called Oz.  I love the riot of CGI colour and subversive naughtiness by which Oz immediately romances the credulous witch Theodora (Mila Kunis), before breaking her heart and turning her to the Dark Side. I love the costume design that sees Rachel Weisz wicked with Evanora in luscious dark green ballgowns and Michelle Williams' good witch Glenda in gorgeous shimmering white. I love the casting of James Franco - who has always been almost too handsome, and painfully wooden and uncomfortable with that beauty.  His too wide smile and slightly hammy acting perfectly suits the conman role.  Most of all, I love the idea that despite all his petty cunning, Oz is really an idealist, who is full of admiration for Edison's inventions, and wonder at the power of cinema. In fact, OZ can be read as a movie about how cinema saves lives, much like ARGO.

The problem is that the movie just takes too long to motor through its various machinations to finally get Oz into his confrontation with the newly wicked Evanora and Theodora.  It also seems too adult for kids and too kiddie for adults - in sharp contrast to Pixar who seem to be able to entertain both groups simultaneously.  How much of the target kiddie audience really get why Evanora turned wicked, and why Oz' final victory is rather ambiguous? And how many adults were squirming with boredom during the whole munchkin, quadling city scene - in fact, for much of the final 90 minutes?

OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL has a running time of 130 minutes and is rated PG in the USA.  The movie opens this weekend in Argentina, Australia, Chile, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Kuwait, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Portugal, Macedonia  Russia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, Thailand, the Ukraine, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Iceland, India, Ireland, Japan, Lithuania, Mexico, Mongolia, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Spain, Turkey, the UK and the USA.  It opens next week in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Taiwan.

London Film Fest 2012 - Day 11 - SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK (SURPRISE FILM)

David O Russell brought arthouse integrity and quality to the underdog sports movie with THE FIGHTER, and pulls the same trick on the rom-com genre with SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK. It's a clever, funny, superbly acted movie with a visceral, up-close and uncomfortable shooting style that almost fools you into thinking that it's a braver, more unconventional movie than it really is.  At its heart, the movie is a basic one - boy meets girl, girl loves boy, boy's too hung up on former lover to realise he loves girl, there's a dance contest, they kiss, the end. The twist is that he's bipolar and just out of a mental institution, she's a widow with massive SLAA issues, his dad's OCD  with anger management issues, and his mum's clearly an enabler. The film's plot is driven by the unhealthy quid pro quo: she'll help him contact his ex (against whom he has a restraining order) if he'll participate in a dance contest with her.

David O Russell's script (based on Matthew Quick's novel) is whip smart and crackles with energy.  Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper have real chemistry and seeing them spar is one of the joys of the film.  It's great to see her broaden her range beyond put-upon hardened teen and similarly it's great to see him move beyond pretty-boy wise-ass roles. There are mis-steps to be sure -  the age difference threw me off and I never really bought it.  The inclusion of an African American character (Chris Tucker is his most modulated and impressive performance to date) only to have him, per movie cliché  contribute to a dance scene by having the white characters "dance blacker". And that schmaltzy final declaration could've come out of a risible Richard Curtis movie.  But overall, it was fun to spend time with the main characters and feel the grunginess of working class Philadelphia through  Masanobu Takayanagi's (WARRIOR) frenetic camerawork. 

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK played Toronto 2012 where David O Russell won the People's Choice Award for Narrative Feature. It was the surprise film at London 2012. The film will be released in the USA, UK, Russia and Iceland on November 21st. It opens in Portugal on December 6th, in Sweden on December 21st, in Germany, Norway and Turkey on January 4th, in Spain on January 11th, in France and Australia on January 31st, in New Zealand and Bulgaria on February 8th, in Argentina on February 21st, in Belgium and the Netherlands on February 27th, in Italy on March 14th and in Denmark on April 25th.  

London Film Fest 2012 Day 1 - FRANKENWEENIE

Tim Burton's FRANKENWEENIE is, despite its black and white mock horror gothic style, a warm-hearted and cuddly family feature, quite at home in the Disney stable.  It transports the story of Frankenstein to that typically Burtonesque 50s style contemporary American suburbia, where little kids can be see the weird and cruel in the everyday.  There are even characters that look and feel and sound like previous Burton characters - notably Winona Ryder voicing a little girl who could've become Lydia in BEETLEJUICE.  Her male counterpart is Little Victor Frankenstein, a good-hearted loner so upset when his beloved pet dog Sparky dies, that he uses the town's preternatural lightning to re-animate him.  Problem is, his creepy school-friends (all junior versions of well known horror tropes) find out about his scientific breakthrough and perform their own reanimations with gruesome and chaotic results.

It took me a while to warm up to the characters - I spent the first twenty minutes more wrily smiling at the horror movie in-jokes and admiring the beautiful hand-made stop-motion animation.  But soon Sparky and Victor stole my heart, and anyone's who's ever had a dog will appreciate the wonderful observation that went into capturing just how a pet dog acts.  As the movie built to its dramatic Godzilla inspired climax, I became genuinely nervous about Sparky's fate!  I can confidently say that if you go and see this movie with an open heart, whether or not with kids, you'll have a good time.

But this film is far more interesting than "just" a superior kids film - not that there's anything wrong with that.  Because FRANKENWEENIE is an absolutely darling film full of affection for the power and history of cinema, and simple delight of making things.  It opens with a film within a film - little Victor showing his parents his home made super eight starring Sparky as the Sparkosaurus.  The celluloid burns, but Victor's unpeturbed -"I can fix it!" he declares.  So much of the mood and spirit of the movie is set by that phrase.  It's a film about the wonder of film - the crazy illusions that we build with props and costumes and trick-shots - the almost juvenile glee that lurks behind even the most accomplished film.  

Tim Burton at the European
Première of Frankenweenie

Of course, director Tim Burton is making a more profound statement about the nature of good film-making.  He's saying that it's better to make a film with love and sticky-tape, then with crass showmanship in mind.  Science and celluloid can be used for good or ill - it needs to come from the heart.  Burton also makes a subversive political comment about the contemporary American anti-intellectual strain within the religious right.  The poor scientist is evidently a European emmigre, who knows what horror he has seen.  He finds himself attacked by a mob of suburban parents angry at "science". This leads to the funniest and most profound scene where he angrily calls them ignorant and stupid: "they like the things science gives them but fear the questions that it asks".  

Maybe I'm being too earnest about the political metatext of FRANKENWEENIE? But I don't think you need to scratch too hard on the surface of the seemingly Spielbergian family adventure to get to its more scabrous heart. And it's that doubling, that wonderful enchantment coupled with deeper provocation, that makes this by far Tim Burton's best film in year - maybe since EDWARD SCISSORHANDS.

FRANKENWEENIE played Fantastic Fest and is currently on release in Canada, Colombia, Paraguay, Romania and the USA. It opens this week in Russia and Spain and next week in Belgium, Ireland, the UK, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Thailand, Ukraine and Iceland. It opens on October 25th in Australia, Chile, Malaysia and Switzerland and on October 31st in France. It opens on November 2nd in Brazil; on November 22nd in Argentina, Greece and Lithuania; on November 29th in Singapore; on December 15th in Japan; on December 28th in Turkey; on January 3rd 2013 in the Czech Republic and Hungary; on Jnauary 11th in Sweden; on January 17th in Denmark, Italy and Norway; and on January 24th in Germany.

Ankle-frack Round-Up 4 - REAL STEEL

REAL STEEL is set in the near-future where robot fighters have taken over from humans.  Hugh Jackman plays a washed up ex-boxer called Charlie, who's so deeply indebted and uninterested in his son Max (Dakota Goyo), that he effectively sells his right to parent to his rich sister-in-law (Hope Davis).  Paid to babysit the kid for a summer, Charlie surprisingly finds himself bonding with the kid who shares love of robots, as well as enough charisma and chutzpah to get their underdog bot a prize fight.  Newly inspired, Charlie teaches the bot to shadow box, setting the film up for a Rocky-like final bout and a schmaltzy finale in which father and son and bot have bonded with each other and the crowd.

I fully expected to hate REAL STEEL but rather enjoyed it.  It's an entirely derivative affair, to be sure, heavily borrowing from ROCKY.  And after the first twenty minutes you can predict everything that's going to happen in the film.  But for all that, there's an unmistakable chemistry between the lead actors, some wonderfully designed fighting robots, and some handsomely choreographed fight scenes - apparently courtesy of Sugar Ray Leonard.  The upshot is that while I knew exactly how the movie would play out, I was genuinely excited and moved by the final fight scene and the shamelessly populist ending. 

Digging into the credits, it's easy to see why the movie works.  The Sugar Ray Leonard credit combined with cinematography from Mauro Fiore (AVATAR) and direction from Shawn Levy (NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM) adds up to technically impressive and visually engaging vis effects.  And the original idea, based on a story by Robert Mathieson (I AM LEGEND) holds our interest.  Overall, REAL STEEL is a perfectly fine kids movie with enough fighting skills to hold an adult's interest.  I can't quite understand the rather sniffy reviews.

REAL STEEL was released in autumn 2011 and is now available to rent and own. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Achievement in Visual Effects but lost to HUGO.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 6 - RESTLESS

Gus Van Sant seems to alternate between directing genuinely art-house cinema often with an experimental edge and directing more mainstream fare.  It has to be said that RESTLESS is very much in the latter camp, and may well be his most banal film since FINDING FORRESTER.  Based on a debut feature film script by playwright Jason Lew, the movie feels like a sort of watered down romance with pretensions to the style and feel of HAROLD & MAUDE or even second-rate Wes Anderson (himself already derivative of H&M). You can't start a film with a lead character obsessively crashing funerals while wearing a three-piece suit and end the film to the sound of Nico without raising eyebrows.

If you set aside all that stylistic pilfering what do you get? A wannabe cute romance between two quirky teenagers: Mia Wasikowska's terminally ill Annabel and Henry Hopper's morbid, mournful Enoch.  They share a dark sense of humour, they don't quite fit into the world, and run around being kooky. We're meant to care. And then she dies. I just couldn't get into the film at all. I wanted the subversive comedy that the opening references to funerals implied, but which the movie didn't deliver aside from one very funny staged death scene.  I wanted the film to make more of it's one genuinely new and good idea - Enoch's imaginary friend, the kamikaze pilot Hiroshi (Ryo).  I wanted the movie to tackle the death from cancer with the honesty of Will Reiser's 50/50 but to no avail. I wanted to care, but just plain didn't.  I mean, there's something wrong with a movie when you care more about the plight of the hero's imaginary friend than the hero himself.  I think the problem here is the script, which once you strip it off its affectations, is pretty banal. The direction, photography and lead performances are just fine. Forgettable, derivative, blah.

RESTLESS opened earlier this year in Egypt, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Italy, Argentina and France. It played Cannes, Toronto and London.  It is currently on release in German, Greece, Russia and Spain and opens on October 21st in Finland and the UK. It opens in Portugal on November 10th; in Sweden on November 25th; in Hong Kong on December 1st and in Japan on December 23rd.

Preview - THE NEXT THREE DAYS

THE NEXT THREE DAYS is a faithful remake of Fred Cafave's French thriller, POUR ELLE / ANYTHING FOR HER. It has been remade by the American writer/director Paul Haggis, famous for scripts and films that are, to my mind, over-long, over-elaborate, over-technical and lacking in real emotion. Unfortunately, THE NEXT THREE DAYS is no exception.

Russell Crowe stars as a schlubby loser who loves his wife and little kid. So, when she's locked up for apparently murdering her boss in a fit of rage, he's devastated. When the conventional legal channels are exhausted, and his despairing wife attempts suicide, poor Schlub has no choice but to plan a prison break-out. Apparently, this is quite easy. You interview a guy who's already written books how to do it; watch a couple of YouTube How To videos; and while you are basically a good guy, you discover hidden physical strengths. These include the ability to a) cold-bloodedly murder some drug-dealers b) drive a car at high speed in on-coming traffic and c) hold on to your wife while your car performs a triple lutz with its door open.

As you might tell from my facetious tone, I wasn't any more convinced of the reality of this film any more than I was by the original. In both versions, the film-makers attempts to ground the movie in reality with a detailed slow-build of research before the prison break fails to do its job. And while Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks are just fine in their roles, the basic concept is simply too incredible to buy into.

Worst still, Paul Haggis direction and script adaptation contrives to bring us out of the film rather than keep us in it. For instance, why make the guy who sells Schlub fake passports deaf? I have nothing against deaf people, but when the actor playing him first spoke you could hear the audience wondering what was going on, (some of them tittering - shame on them) and it was a distraction. Another example is where Schlub has done something bad but then counters by doing something that's meant to be sympathetic. But as his car pulls away and we still the shot of what he's done, it's just plain funny. The audience in my preview screening laughed AT the movie, rather than being impressed by the emotional confusion of the protagonist. Third Paul Haggis does his typical thing of dumbing everything down. Why does he need to play a childish game, teasing us with whether or not the wife really did murder her boss? At least the French flick had the maturity to make that a non-issue. And finally, this movie has more endings than LORD OF THE RINGS: RETURN OF THE KING.

Overall, dull, banal, incredible (literally), and while decently acted, utterly forgettable. Save your money, save your time.

THE NEXT THREE DAYS is on release in the US, Belgium, Kazakhstan, Russia, Canada, Poland, Egypt, Kuwait, Singapore, Bulgaria, Finland, Norway and the Philippines. It opens next weekend in France, Greece and the Netherlands. It opens on December 24th in Brazil; on January 7th in the UK; on January 20th in Germany and Hungary.

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.

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 Fest Day 13 - TAKING WOODSTOCK

TAKING WOODSTOCK sees Ang Lee, director of tense, beautiful tragic romances - LUST, CAUTION and BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN - take a step back into gentle comedy. The resulting film is warm-hearted, earnest, occasionally funny, but also somewhat ramshackle, meandering and ultimately, unsatisfying. Interesting characters are given too little screen time in an ensemble film, uninteresting characters are left to over-act wildly, and the third act acid trip is a complete waste of half an hour. Maybe the problem is that Ang Lee doesn't quite have the conviction he needs to make a film about a famous concert that IS NOT a concert film. He wants to tell the story of the family who's run-down motel became the HQ of the organisers and the impact the festival had on them. He wants to make a point about Woodstock being, for most people, about the journey there and the people you met, rather than the concert itself. But Ang Lee does cave in and gives us his protagonist journeying toward the mainstage and getting dragged into acid trips and mud-slides. It's just too much of a tease! Either focus on the motel, or give us the concert, but don't flail around in the mud!

The movie starts of well. We have a likable protagonist called Elliot - a sweet kid, who's compromising on his dream of going to San Francisco because he's helping out on his parent's run-down motel in the Catskills and because he can't quite admit that he's gay. Faced with foreclosure, he decides to invite the Woodstock festival to relocate to his parents' motel and his neighbour's land, when the folks in that town rescind the permit, scared of thousands of freaks showing up. Before you know it, the cash is rolling in and Elliot's conservative parents are surrounded with hippies and beats. Both they, and Elliot, experience many-splendored life, and then the festival rolls of out town.

The period setting and casting are absolutely spot on, with the exception of rather broad performances from Emile Hirsch as Billy and Dan Fogler as Devon, the Earthlight Player. Imelda Staunton and Henry Goodman are particularly good as Elliot's rather flummoxed parents, and Demetri Martin is affable and congenial as Elliot. But the two most interesting characters get way too little screen time. The first is Eugene Levy in a fairly straight performance as farmer Max Yasgur, the guy who actually rented out his fields to the festival. Why was such a provincial farmer so very liberal minded? Fascinating, but unexplored. The second fascinating, but too little explored character, was Vilma, a former US marine turned transvestite, played by Liev Schreiber. What a wonderful character! And what a fascinating nascent relationship with Elliot's father! I would have loved to spend more time with them. But instead we get Ang Lee trying, very clumsily, to speak to Vietnam in the form of the cliche of a battle-traumatised Vietnam vet, and to speak to the counter-culture in the form of a completely pointless acid trip. And when Ang Lee tries to create some real dramatic tension with a final act revelation involving Elliot's mother, it all seems out of tone with the rest of the film. Shame.

TAKING WOODSTOCK played Cannes 2009. It opened earlier this year in the US, Australia, Canada, Sweden, the USA, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Portugal, Estonia, France and Spain. It is currently on release in Hong Kong, Israel, Singapore, India, Italy, Taiwan, Belgium and Greece. It opens in the UK on November 6th, in Argentina and Mexico on December 10th and in Brazil on January 15th 2010.

TERMINATOR SALVATION - a lovely little walking toaster of your very own

TERMINATOR SALVATION is a technically well-made, visually interesting addition to the franchise. Problem is, the plot and character ideas are so ill-developed that the action sequences lose all meaning and dissolve into one long roar of sound and fury.

All if which is a great shame, because director McG (of CHARLIE'S ANGELS fame) clearly had aspirations for greatness, citing influences from THE GREAT ESCAPE to Cormac McCarthy's grim post-apocalyptic novel, THE ROAD. The colour and design of this film is sombre and the mood serious. We have shots of a concrete building collapsing on itself and white dust billowing over the wreckage - an image straight from 9-11. We have scenes of humanity turned savage, fighting over food and fuel. The only wink to the in-joke of the franchise comes late in.

The set-up of the film is promising but squandered. Christian Bale takes on the role of John Connor, prophesied leader of the Resistance against Skynet - the sentient defense machine that launched a pre-emptive strike against humanity on Judgment Day. Terminator robots were designed and sent back in time to kill Connor, his mother and his father with no success. Radical rethinking was required. Skynet creates a Cylon - half human, half android - a Terminator with a real heart. The stage is set for brilliant drama. How far can the Cylon have free will, and counter his programming to destroy the humans? In what sense can a woman really fall in love with a man who is half-robot? These are some of the questions that were explored with great insight and wit in the re-imagined BATTLESTAR GALACTICA.

But TERMINATOR SALVATION is only interested in these questions insofar as they provide breathing room between the set-piece action sequences. Time and again, we have rushed, superficial scenes that hint at deeper questions but never give them room to develop. Thus, resistance fighter Blair Williams (Moon Bloodgood, weak performance) falls for the Cylon who saved her life, and risks her own life to set him free. All this is essayed in five minutes and one scene of laughably Mills & Boon dialogue. Later in the film, the Cylon confronts his creators and asserts his humanity. Sam Worthington gives a good performance despite his inability to hold down an American accent, but we soon jump back to Christian Bale's attack on Skynet HQ.

And what about Christian Bale? His involvement with this film will no doubt be remembered for his ill-tempered attack on the Director of Photography, replayed to the masses on Youtube. This draws attention away from the fact that he has turned in a very mediocre performance in a thankless role. As in the THE DARK KNIGHT, he seems to think that adopting a growling deep voice conveys profundity and authority. And, as in THE DARK KNIGHT, he is upstaged by another actor, for this is really Sam Worthington's film. Maybe Bale just wasn't inspired by a character that is basically one-dimensional. There is an argument that if you were raised by your mother to be the saviour of humanity you WOULD be earnest, single-minded and dull. But, Connor should be charismatic - and when asking the Resistance to commit mutiny - he should sound more convincing, more inspiring than he does. Anton Yelchin, as Connor's teenage father-to-be, Kyle Reese, has more charisma, and indeed, more screen presence, than Bale.

All of this speaks to the weakness of the script overall - as evidenced by the numerous re-writes. Let's only hope they do a better job on the already announced, McG-helmed, TERMINATOR 5.

TERMINATOR SAVLATION is on release everywhere but Japan, where it opens next week, and Mexico, where it opens on July 31st.

NOTORIOUS - what do you want? A cookie?

When I was a kid, rap music spoke about the menace of crime, poverty, drug addiction and institutional racism. If you go back and listen to The Message, Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five talk about people pissing in stairwells and OD'ing. A decade later, and New York dope peddler turned rapper Christopher Wallis aka Biggie Smalls aka Notorious B.I.G. was talking about diamond earrings, champagne and fucking an endless stream of compliant and thankful women. He did this while posing in shiny suits - simultaneously boasting of his high-class style and his gangster credentials. The narcissism was almost as irritating as his producer, Sean "Puffy" Combs, mumbling in the background of his records and dancing like a fool in the videos. (Voletta Wallace: What kind of grown-ass man calls himself "Puffy?")

All that posturing turned nasty in 1994 when West Coast rapper Tupac Shukar accused Biggie and Puffy of setting him up to be robbed and shot. Biggie retaliated by releasing a record called "Who Shot Ya?" - a diss record, conveniently recorded months before the shooting. Then Death Row Records boss Suge Knight, who comes across as perhaps the nastiest person in this whole sordid mess, nevertheless said what everyone was thinking at the 1995 Source Awards: "Any artists out there who wants to be an artist and stay a star, and don’t wanna have to worry about the executive producer trying to be…all in the videos, all on the records, dancing…come to Death Row!” The bullshit escalated. The media loved it. The East Coast West Coast Rivalry sold papers. It also resulted in the death of Tupac in 1996 and the death of Biggie in 1997. Neither murder case has been solved by the police.

There are a number of interesting films that one might make from this story. Nick Broomfield investigated the murders in his insightful, if brash, documentary BIGGIE AND TUPAC. One could imagine a WALKING THE LINE style biopic that put the rappers into context and showed their impact on the music scene and their legacy. Sadly, NOTORIOUS is neither of these things. After all, we're not going to get cast-iron objectivity in a movie produced by the deceased's mother and one of the leading characters, P. Diddy himself.

In other words, NOTORIOUS is hagiography of the laziest, most clumsy sort. Lazy, because it's so enthralled by Biggie that it doesn't even bother to apologize for the fact that he's a callow, narcissistic fool. It just ASSUMES that we love him too. Clumsy because against all evidence to the contrary, it tries to shoe-horn Biggie's life into a conventional biopic and that means Character Development. Biggie's life has to have meaning - purpose - fulfillment. We have to excuse all his questionable actions because, hell, he was just becoming "A Man".

It reminded me of that Chris Rock sketch: "You know the worst thing about niggas? Niggas always want credit for some shit they supposed to do. A nigga will brag about some shit a normal man just does. A nigga will say some shit like, "I take care of my kids." You're supposed to, you dumb motherfucker! What kind of ignorant shit is that? "I ain't never been to jail!" What do you want, a cookie?! You're not supposed to go to jail, you low-expectation-having motherfucker!"

Before this movie I didn't know much about Biggie and what I knew didn't endear me to him. After this movie, I feel I don't know, or want to know, anything more. There's absolutely no attempt to string together a coherent picture of his emotional life. Worse still, there's no attempt to put his music in context and to show us why he was a good rapper. You'll learn more about how to put together a record from HUSTLE AND FLOW.

NOTORIOUS is on release in the US and UK and played Berlin 2008, improbably. It opens in Australia on March 12th, in Germany on March 26th, in the Netherlands on April 16th, in Singapore on April 30th, and in Belgium and France on June 24th.

HELLBOY II - THE GOLDEN ARMY - hands (of doom) down the best of the summer blockbusters

HELLBOY II - THE GOLDEN ARMY is by far the most satisfying of the summer blockbusters in terms of sureness of purpose; visual flair; emotional engagement; and sheer balls-out entertainment. It leaves the HULK and IRON MAN trailing in its wake, and while THE DARK KNIGHT may have been more ambitious and seditious, it teased more than satisfied: HELLBOY II, by contrast, shows a film-maker in full control of his medium and his subject matter.

The story is simple but captivating, rooted in myth and legend. Man has encroached upon the territory of monsters, and Prince Nuada will lead a mechanical golden army to reclaim that territory. His twin sister, Princess Nuala wants to maintan the peace and unites with Hellboy and his fellow paranormal investigators at the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. So, "Red" goes into battle once more, defendng the very humans who call him a freak, turning against his own kind. On top of which, he's got relationship problems with is pyrokinetic girlfriend Liz Sherman; he's being ragged by his new boss, an ethereal officious pyschic called Johann Krauss; and his best friend, a merman called Abe Sapien has gone goofy for the Princess. What's a demon to do but slap on the Barry Manilow, drink more beer and kick the crap out of the other guy?!

Guillermo del Toro's plotting is admirably neat and linear, and that allows him to spend all his time, care and energy on some of the most wonderful visuals to be seen in a summer blockbuster. Art-house fans will see the same sort of organic, authentic fantasy creatures from PAN'S LABRYNTH on a far bigger canvas. The genius od del Toro is to harness the power of CGI without making his creatures look too fake, sleek and automated. His world is grimy, grungy, living and breathing, mythic and beautiful. The "cantina" scene in the Troll Market already has me desperate to see the movie again and wallow ithe richness of the imagination on show. And the internal mechanisms of the Golden Army are intricate and breath-taking.

The rich visuals are complemented by a script and performances that manage to walk the line between genuine emotional engagement and laugh-out-loud comedy. It says a lot for Anna Walton and Seth "Family Guy" MacFarlane that we fall for a love story between two characters played from behind serious make-up and prosthetics - the most unlikely romantic couple in cinema. And Ron Perlman has cause to feel overlooked in all the hype about Heath Ledger. He's consistently one of the most charismatic and engagic actors working. He manages to pull of deeply romantic scenes with Liz (Selma Blair), moments of soul-searching, and slapstick comedy in fights with Krauss and drunken male bonding with Abe.

Many summer blockbusters try to capture the heady mix of action, romance, comedy and myth that made the original STAR WARS flick and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK so enjoyable and memorable. Few have succeeded. But HELLBOY II is firmly in that genre, and is one of the very few CGI movies to be a master of its technology rather than a slave to it.

HELLBOY II - THE GOLDEN ARMY was released earlier this year in Singapore, Thailand, Mexico, Panama, the US, Iceland, Italy, Israel and Russia. It opens on Agust 14th in Russia; on August 15th in Turkey; on August 20th in the UK; on August 21st in Hungary, the Netherlands and Portugal; on August 22nd in Norway; on August 28th in Australia and on August 29th in Spain. It opens on September 5th in Slovakia, Brazil, Denmark, Estonia and Finland and later in September in Poland and Sweden. It opens in October in Argentina, Greece, Venezuela, Germany, Belgium, Egypt and France.