Bryan Singer retrospective - APT PUPIL (1998)

After the award ceremonies and the commercial success of THE USUAL SUSPECTS everyone was waiting to see what director Bryan Singer would do next. The weight of expectation bore down heavily on his 1998 flick APT PUPIL, which is a tremendous shame, because while it's no pantheon movie, it looks weaker than it objectively is in comparison to THE USUAL SUSPECTS.

The movie is based on a novella by Stephen King in which an intelligent teenager called Todd (Brad Renfro) realises that an old man called Kurt Dussander (Ian McKellan) in his neighbourhood is actually a Nazi war criminal in hiding. Rather than shop the old man to the cops, Todd decides to exploit the him, trading silence in exchange for lurid stories of concentration camps. Todd thinks he's the dominant partner in this twisted relationship, trying to humiliate Kurt by making him wear an SS uniform while he drills him. But as Todd's fetish grows, Kurt becomes the dominant partner, as he can choose to feed the addiction or not. Moreover, Kurt is now posing as Todd's grandfather, covering for Todd at school as his grades are now suffering. The power game is reversed.

All of this makes for an intelligent and frightening psychological thriller. The problem comes in the final reels when the two-handed character study is shoe-horned into a lurid and somewhat unnecessary ending. It's as if the film-makers thought that the movie needed some action - some sort of genre conformist ending. The only other thing I would say about APT PUPIL is that what makes it still worth viewing are the two central performances and the original conceit by Stephen King. I was disappointed then and now by the fact that Bryan Singer hadn't given the material a particular visual style or indeed any other kind of directorial thumb-print. APT PUPIL struck me as a movie made by a director-for-hire rather than an auteur.

APT PUPIL played Venice and Toronto 1997 and was released in 1998 and 1999.

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

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

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

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

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

RUN FATBOY RUN - save yourself 10 quid and just watch the trailer...

....coz all the laughs and the entire plot of this schmaltzy rom-com are contained therein.

True, Simon Pegg did co-write and star in RUN FATBOY RUN but his mojo has evidently been diluted by the writing "talents" of Michael Ian Black (Reno 911 - 'nuff said) and the incipient directing "talents" of David "Ross" Schwimmer. The story is derivative and stretched thin. Pegg plays a loser who walked out on his pregnant fiancee (Thandie Newton) five years ago. In the present day, he enters a marathon in order to win her back from her new rich American boyfriend (Hank Azaria). The only saving grace is Dylan Moran in a Black Books'esque role as Pegg's best friend. Cameos by David Walliams and Stephen Merchant are utterly wasted. Also, why is it every London-based investment banker in a US financed movie works in the Swiss Re tower?

RUN FATBOY RUN is on release in the UK and opens in the US on October 26th 2007.

BIG NOTHING - the irony is obvious

BIG NOTHING sadly lives up to its name. It stars an ex-Friend (David Schwimmer), a hillarious British comedian (Simon Pegg) and a random young British actress called (Alice Eve). They are marooned in a movie that aims at quirky crime-gone-wrong comedy of the kind I loved in THE WHOLE NINE YARDS but languishes in mediocrity. It is rarely funny, poorly scripted, over-dependent on visual quirks and despite its short 85 minute run-time bored me rigid. Most embarassing was Simon Pegg's painful American accent.

BIG NOTHING is on release in the UK and Ireland. Looks like the rest of the world is being spared.