CHRISTOPHER ROBIN

CHRISTOPHER ROBIN comes to our screens with an impeccable pedigree.  It's director, Marc Forster, has previously explored the inner lives of iconic British children's authors with FINDING NEVERLAND. And its screenwriters have both written and directed award-winning films - whether Alex Ross Perry with HER SMELL or Tom McCarthy with SPOTLIGHT.  It also stars three charismatic British actors - Ewan McGregor as Christopher Robin; Hayley Atwell as his wife; and Mark Gatiss as his venal boss.  And the animation is really lovely - the characters of Winnie The Pooh are fluffy and cuddly and voiced by actors that truly bring them to life!  

And yet, despite all this, the movie just fails to spark interest or emotion.  Maybe its because the opening scenes of a work-worn middle-aged Christopher Robin take so long to establish. Maybe it's because we only see Christopher returning Pooh to the Hundred Acre Wood and having fun with all his childhood friends about an hour in. Maybe it's because even when his daughter meets the animals there still doesn't seem to be any real sense of joy in the film.  And without that, all we really have is a rehash of the story of MARY POPPINS. So, sadly, this is one to avoid. 

CHRISTOPHER ROBIN is rated PG and has a running time of 107 minutes.  It is now available to rent and own.

WORLD WAR Z

So here's a quick ten minute audio review of Brad Pitt's passion project, WORLD WAR Z, based on one my favourite novels of the past decade.  I went into this flick worried about the "troubled" nature of this project - budget over-runs, re-writes - and director Marc Forster's poor track record with big budget action flicks (QUANTUM OF SOLACE, m'lud).  To be sure, the tonal shift is obvious where Damon Lindelof takes over the writing, and this is a very different beast to the novel.  But overall, I really enjoyed it - in fact, it's arguably the best of the summer blockbusters to date. Tune in for more....

WORLD WAR Z has been rated PG-13 in the USA and has a running time of 116 minutes.

WORLD WAR Z is on release in the USA, Egypt, Hong Kong, the Philippines, South Africa, Australia, Bosnia, Croatia, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, New Zealand, Portugal, Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the UAE, Bulgaria, Canada, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Lithuania, Mexico, Romania, Turkey, the UK and Vietnam. It opens on June 27th in Argentina, Austria, Cambodia, Chile, the Czech Republic, the Dominican Republic, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Peru, Russia, Switzerland, the Ukraine, Brazil, Colombia, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia and Panama. It opens on July 3rd in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Poland; on July 11th in Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Sweden; on July 19th in Finland; on August 2nd in Spain; on August 10th in Japan and on August 16th in Venezuela.

London Film Fest Day 15 - QUANTUM OF SOLACE - the Bond that dare not speak its name

Health warnings up-front. I despise the Ian Fleming Bond novels. They are vulgar, misogynistic, sado-masochistic fantasy novels that miss the mark on international espionage as far as Michael Bay missed the mark with PEARL HARBOUR. Give me the grime of John Le Carre any day. As far as the movies go, I appreciated the pre-Daniel Craig franchise insofar as it was camp, ludicrous, gratuitously luxurious and balls-out ridiculous. To me, Bond was only good insofar as he was driving pretty cars and the villains were stroking a white cat. I can, however, see why many people didn't like the old Bond flicks. The boundary between being camp and just being bad is easily transgressed viz. DIE ANOTHER DAY.

I think a lot of people who hate typical Bond movies liked CASINO ROYALE because it was trying to be a BOURNE film. It had characters with real emotions, a decent plot, proper actors and some okay action scenes. I, on the other hand, hated CASINO ROYALE on the grounds that if I want to watch a decent spy thriller, I'll watch THE BOURNE IDENTITY. If I watch a Bond film I want a Bond film. I don't want Bond driving a fracking Ford Mondeo and playing Poker in the Hotel Splendide.

My view is that the Bond franchise has now boxed itself into a corner. It's too ashamed to do anything too Bond - random rumpy-pumpy, gratuitous violence - but feels that it has to nod to the genre-tropes. So, in QUANTUM OF SOLACE, Bond does have a random shag with Gemma Arterton but it's all very perfunctory and joyless. On the other hand, the movie wants to be both an emotional character drama AND an action film. So you find yourself in a very odd mish-mash of a film. In the case of QUANTUM OF SOLACE, it's directed by Marc Forster (THE KITE RUNNER, STRANGER THAN FICTION) who knows how to do drama. Problem is, he can't direct action movies for toffee. It's all hand-held close-ups and frenetic editing so you can't tell what's going on. I was just praying for him to pull back, keep the camera still and just let the action unwind.

All this is to delay the inevitable point where I attempt to tell you the plot of QUANTUM OF SOLACE. This is tricky because QoS is a really badly written, poorly assembled film, with a narrative (and indeed a title) that never quite make sense. It's a terrible waste of Daniel Craig and Mathieu Amalric as the baddie. Gemma Arterton barely gets a look-in and Olga Kurylenko is once again just a body. The basic idea is that Bond is on the warpath after the shadowy evil organisation that forced the suicide of his lover, Vesper Lynd. So Bond goes ga-ga, indulging in a plethora of chase scenes in the company of similarly vengeful Camille (Olga Kurylenko). They are chasing down Dominic Greene (Amalric), head of a Smersh like org called Quantum (a-ha!) We know he's a purveyor of evil because he's essentially a utilities trader! And that's it. Welcome to Bond does Enron.

Obviously, all the deeply annoying crap from CASINO holds over here. The shameless merchandising; the endless chases; the embarassment at being Bond at all. But even if you liked CASINO ROYALE I think you might be disappointed with QUANTUM OF SOLACE because it doesn't even have the compensation of tight plotting and emotional engagement.

QUANTUM OF SOLACE played London 2008. It goes on release in the UK, France and Sweden this weekend. It opens next weekend in Bahrain, Belgium, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Oman, the Philippines, Switzerland, Argentina, Bolivia,Chile, Croatia, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Israel, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Peru, Portugal, Qatar, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Syria, Thailand, Ukraine, UAE, Italy and Norway. It opens on November 14th in Hungary, Austria, Belize, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estonia, Finland, Guatemala, Honduras, Iceland, India, Kenya, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Panama, Poland, Romania, Taiwan, Turkey and the USA. It opens in Australia on 19th November; in Spain on the 21st; in South Africa on the 28th; in New Zealand and Venezuela on the 4th December; in Uruguay on the 26th December and in Japan on January 10th 2009.

THE KITE RUNNER - well-made Afghan drama

THE KITE RUNNER is a handsome adaptation of the best-selling novel by Khaled Hosseini. David Benioff's script cuts down the novel into three main episodes that encapsulate the story of two young boys whose friendship plays out against the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in the late 1970s, and much later, the Taliban take-over. The first part sees two best friends playing with kites in Kabul. Amir is a cowardly, sensitive, privileged child. He is protected by his best friend Hassan, an illiterate, servant-boy from a tribe that is looked down upon. The two young actors playing these boys - Zekiria Ebrahimi and Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada - have real chemistry and you really believe in their friendship. This makes Amir's betrayal of Hassan all the more tragic. The betrayal is never resolved because Amir is smuggled out of Afghanistan with his father when the Russian's invade. We pick up the story when Amir is courting his wife-to-be in California. Khalid Abdalla and Atossa Leoni are convicingly gauche as the young couple but the real joy of this second segment is the acerbic wit of Amir's father (Homayoun Ershadi). It's also fascinating to get an insider's view of the Afghan community in the US. The third part of the film is the most dramatic and moving. Amir returns to Afghanistan under the Taliban to rescue his childhood friend's young son. Marc Forster and his production team recreate Talibani Afghanistan in the mountains of China and they are unsparing. We see an adulterous women stoned to death at a football match. It's quite amazing. You read of stoning in the Bible - as with all those stories it loses its punch with the re-telling - but you realise how radical and relevant the message of that story is when you realise that people are still subject to such ruthless punishment in contemporary society.

Fans of the novel may feel cheated by the necessary abridgement of its themes and content, but Forster and Benioff have produced a swift-paced, engrossing, well-acted and handsomely-produced film. It moves you, but perhaps more importantly, it gives you a glimpse of life in a country that is of key importance in modern politics.

THE KITE RUNNER is on release in the US, Australia and UK. It opens in the Netherlands, Mexico, Germany, Brazil, Norway, Argentina and Singapore in January. It opens in Denmark, Italy, Belgiu, France, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Iceland, Romania, Turkey and Finland in February. It opens n Spain, Taiwan and Thailand in March and in Japan on May 31st.

STAY - visually stylish but frustrating psychological thriller

STAY is a psycholgical thriller. It is set in modern-day New York and stars Ewan MacGregor as a psychiatrist, Dr Sam Foster. When Foster's colleague suffers a nervous breakdown he takes over one of her patients - a twenty-year old art student called Henry Letham. Letham is threatening to commit suicide on his twenty-first birthday and Foster is desperate to stop him. The problem is that the more Foster investigates Letham's life the more he feels he is losing grip on reality.

The movie is visually stylish and uses jarring edits and dissolves in a clever manner to unsettle the viewer and convey Foster's increasingly tenuous grip on reality. The movie also features a talented cast, including Naomi Watts, Ryan Gosling and Bob Hoskins. It is directed by the man who helmed FINDING NEVERLAND and written by the man behind 25th HOUR. But despite the incredibly impressive look and pedigree of the film, I found STAY to be a noble failure.

I love movies that rely on a clever twist or have an unsettling tone, but in this case so few pointers are given to the audience that the viewing experience becomes frustrating, alienating and finally, plain dull. When the final twist is revealed everything does make sense, but short of going back to re-view the movie it is hard to see what the cinema-goer will gain from the overall experience.

STAY was released in the US in October 2005 and is currently on release in Germany, Italy and the UK. It opens in Austria on April 28th 2006 and in France on July 26th.