THE WOMAN KING****

THE WOMAN KING is a curiously old-fashioned and satisfying action epic that brings to an untold (at least in the west) story of the Dahomey empire the same kind of sword and sandal grand sweep of films like GLADIATOR.  Director Gina

Prince Bythewood (THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES) proves to be an impressive helmer of large-scale battle sequences. Cinematographer Polly Morgan conjures up majestic landscapes and the visceral heat of the red-earthed soil.  And Terrence Blanchard gives us a score that both has orchestral majesty and the bone-stirring war-cries of native songs.  This is a film to stir us and impress us.  Just look at Viola Davis' newly jacked physique. She and her female warriors look every inch the part.  But this film also gives us real emotion and doesn't shy away from the terror of war, far beyond the typical machismo of male-led films.  When Davis' General Nansica relates how she was the victim of rape, we are with her in her trauma.  When her deputy Izogie (Lashana Lynch) and her newly trained warrior Nawe (Thuso Mbedu) are captured, we feel their peril.  Maybe this isn't such old-fashioned film-making after all.

The only thing that lets this film down is its rather wooden dialogue from screenwriters Dana Stevens and Maria Bello, and a rather thinly drawn set of antagonists in John Boyega's King and his wife. What the film posits is a callow king who is torn between taking the riches of slavery (his wife's advice) and standing up to the neighbouring Oyo tribe and diverting his own economy toward palm oil production (Nansica's advice).  Sadly the King does little but look aggrieved and his wife is a caricature rich spoiled woman.  The film could've done more to show her motivations, given that her position is actually the one that the Dahomey empire took.

THE WOMAN KING is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 135 minutes.

Random DVD Round-Up 2 - GROWN-UPS

GROWN-UPS is an alleged warm-hearted comedy that utterly fails to entertain on any level. 

The conceit is that four school-friends, now grown-up, come together at the funeral of their beloved school sports coach, and spend the weekend together in a vacation home. Their lives have taken them in different directions. Adam Sandler's character has turned into a big name Hollywood name, and is married to a glamorous fashion designer (Salma Hayek). Meanwhile Kevin James' character has ended up a small-time employee, much to his own shame. The movie is meant to be about how these friends rediscover their friendship and what really matters in life. It's meant to be about how our kids have become spoiled by Tivo and video games and need to just run around in the mud sometimes. All laudable aims. 

But in terms of execution, the fact that this flick was directed by Dennis Dugan (YOU DON'T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN, BIG DADDY, HAPPY GILMORE) and co-written with Fred Wolf (THE HOUSE BUNNY, LITTLE NICKY) tells you all you need to know about the crass humour and crude narrative arcs that the characters are sent on. I didn't invest in any of the characters, and so didn't care about their enlightenment. I didn't buy into the fashion designer ditching her Milan show - her heart melting with surprising ease. Even worse, I hated the so-called attempts at comedy. What happened to Maria Bello's career that she takes a part where her only job is to provide a "gag" about her toddler still drinking breast milk? Am I really meant to laugh at a grown man falling into mud? And what dirt do SNL has-beens David Spade and Rob Schneider have on Adam Sandler that he keep casting them in his films? 

 Still, it's far more watchable than COUPLE'S RETREAT. 

 GROWN UPS was released in summer 2010 and is available to rent and own.

Random DVD Round-Up 4 - THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE

THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE is a movie that is utterly, wretchedly disappointing. Despite an all-star cast, and handsome production values, the resulting film is uneven in tone, superficial where it wants to be profound, and undeserving of the big emotional punches it tries to pull.

The film was written and directed by Rebecca Miller(THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE), based on her own play. It features the eponymous Pippa Lee (Robin Wright Penn) as a middle-aged woman, questioning her life choices through a series of flashbacks. Despite her picture perfect middle-aged existence, we learn that, as a young girl, Pippa was damaged by her exposure to her mother's addiction to speed and resulting psychological problems. The young Pippa (Blake Lively) thus high-tails it to New York where she almost falls into become a soft-porn model for her aunt's girlfriend (Julianne Moore) out of sheer boredom, develops a drug habit of her own, but then is rescued by an older man (Alan Arkin.) Fast forward to her present day crisis, and Pippa is living with her aged husband in a retirement community. She is insulted by his affair with a damaged even younger woman (Winona Ryder) and so trips into an affair of her own with an equally damaged young man (Keanu Reeves).

As I said, this is a well-cast film, and handsomely photographed. I have no doubt that Miller is trying to earnestly explore middle-aged feminine angst and to say something profound about self-esteem and addiction. The problem is that none of it seems real. It all seems like a very stage-y very contrived set of scenes, clumsily shuffled into a movie. At times it almost seems like a caricature of one of those Woody Allen films, except without the wry humour, where old men seem to be able to attract ever younger more attractive women and everyone spends the whole time discussing their neuroses and committing suicide.

Enough already.

THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE was released last autumn and is available on DVD and on iTunes.

Random DVD Round-Up 6 - BUTTERFLY ON A WHEEL aka SHATTERED

Tab A fits perfectly into Slot B in this taut, competent thriller. Gerard Butler and Maria Bello play a successful complacent couple, terrorised by a vengeful Pierce Brosnan. He kidnaps their kid, issues sadistic demands and they run around town all night. The mood is noir. The atmosphere is sombre. There's a satisfying plot twist and then a slightly rubbish one. Overall this is an engaging way to spend ninety minutes and I can't quite figure out why it had such a limited theatrical release.

BUTTERFLY ON A WHEEL was released in autumn 2007 and is available on DVD.

THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR - mindless fun, yay!

As I said in my review of HELLBOY II, the action-adventure romantic-comedy is one of the hardest genres to pull off. It demands a disciplined approach to plotting and the ability to keep the audience engaged in an emotional story despite all the whistles and bangs of the set-piece action sequences. In short, the director needs to be a master of technology, action, comedy and bring it all together in a coherent whole. When adventure movies work, they are about as much fun as you can have at the cinema. They exploit the scale and the group participation that you can only get with a packed house on opening night in a really big screen. I defy you to enjoy anything more than the opening night of HELLBOY II or, back in the day, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARC or THE GOONIES. INDIANA JONES 4 should've given us that thrill but it didn't.

THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR certainly isn't in the class of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and it owes those movies a debt of gratitude for set pieces in Shanghai and scenes at archeological digs. But THE MUMMY series, of which this is the best yet, certainly ticks all the right boxes for an entertaining, undemanding night out at the cinema. The movies have a lot of energy, exciting chase scenes and exotic locations, and for the most part roll along at a rapid pace throwing a good few laughs along the way.

In this episode, Rick and Evy are disgruntled with boring post-war married life, and take up the Foreign Office's offer to deliver a precious jewel to Shanghai. It turns out that the jewel will help resurrect an ancient Chinese emperor and his Terracotta Army - artefacts that Rick and Evy's son Alex just happens to have excavated. So follows much running, leaping, flying, wise-cracking and romancing.

The obvious glitches are the casting of a boy who looks way to old relative to his parents, and the fact that Maria Bello, fine actress though she is, being unable to pull off an English accent. It's also a bit frustrating to see Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh in a movie but no awesome martial arts sequences. However, this is more than compensated for by Brendan Fraser's trademark gusto, and John Hannah's ability to make cheesy lines like "My ass is on fire: spank my ass!" funny.

THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR is on release in Argentina, Chile, Hong Kong, Hungary, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, India, Mexico, Panama, Poland, Spain, Turkey, the USA, Venezuela, Egypt, France, Iceland, Indonesia and the UK. It opens this weekend in Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Pakistan, Romania, Sweden and Japan, It opens next weekend in Belgium, Croatia, Slovenia, Japan and Israel. The movie opens in September in Australia, Greece, New Zealand and Italy.

Overlooked DVD of the month - THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB

THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB is remarkably like a Jane Austen novel. It's peopled with a group of women searching for love. Althought the women face obstacles, not least their own inability to see love when it's staring them in the face, everything ends happily and order is restored. The entire process is charming and witty and involving and entirely harmless. The ensemble cast do a great job. I particularly liked Hugh Dancy is his role as a relentlessly optimistic IT-geek called Grigg. I've never been particularly impressed by Dancy before but he utterly won me over with his performance in a role which is hard to take seriously. He makes Grigg more than just a two-dimensional nice guy. The upshot is that I finished the movie in a sunny mood entirely at odds with my usual callous, cyncical demeanour.

Once the optimistic glow had subsided, my usual cynicism kicked in and the house of cards collapsed. The whole movie was contrived from top to bottom. The idea is that five women and one man meet once a month and discuss one of Austen's novels. Such is Austen's universal wit and wisdom that they can draw piquant life lessons from her novels and apply them to their own lives in contemporary California. Problem is that a lot of the lessons seem misapplied, or stretched to say the least.

Consider PERSUASION - a wonderful novel about second chances. The lessons are applied to Prudie and Dean. Prudie has delusions of a Left-Bank life; Dean is a neanderthal. Apparently having him read PERSUASION will lead to a rekindling of their romance. Sorry. Not buying it. The whole set up of the film is that they are congenitally unsuited. Reading a novel won't change that. And what about the relationship at the core of the film - between a repressed older woman, Jocelyn, and the younger man determined to win her love - Grigg. Apart from the completely predictable way in which they come together, I really hated the fact that the reasons for Joceyln to be so closed off were never explained. This made it hard to sympathise with her. She just seemed mean.

Apparently these issues are dealt with at more length in the novel and I look forward to reading it. And I suppose any movie can't be all bad if it makes you want to spend more time with its characters....?

THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB played Toronto 2007 and was released last year. It's now available on DVD.

Disconnected thoughts on WORLD TRADE CENTER

WORLD TRADE CENTER is an earnest film. It handles a shocking event in US history with sensitivity. It features a script by newbie Andrea Berloff that carefully uses testimony from survivors no matter how hackneyed or unintentionally political the results may be. It features the sort of glossy, big-budget, impressive, weighty production design and cinematography that one would expect from a grave Hollywood treatment of this subject. And most of all, it features a career-redefining performance from Nic Cage as one of the fireman rescued from the wreckage of the Twin Towers, as well as strong supporting performances from Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

WORLD TRADE CENTER is NOT an Oliver Stone movie. It does not have a grand visual style - it does not engage in taboo subjects with excoriating insight - it does not challenge us to re-evaluate our relationship with events that have become, for better of worse, part of our pop-culture. And while the use of the true story of the heroic religious marine sticks to the facts, it undoubtedly creates a political spin to the movie that seems rather crass and, bizarrely, at odds with Oliver Stone's previous work. Indeed, in this movie I fear that Stone has finally been what his critics have always accused him of being - irresponsible with history - in focusing on the story of the gung-ho US marine.

WORLD TRADE CENTER is not a movie that I think belongs on the big screen, despite its good intentions and largely good performances. I think it belongs on The Hallmark Channel. It may be all 100% true and earnestly transmitted to the audience, but the conversations between the two firefighters and the visions they experience seem to me - when projected onto a movie screen - incredible and manipulative.

It is, to me, incomprehensible that a film-maker should come at 9/11 from this angle. For me, it is up there with SCHINDLER'S LIST as a truly bizarre film. I find there to be something sociologically interesting but nonetheless depressing about the choices that Stone and Spielberg have chosen to make. To me, 9/11 is about an act of brutal violence and innocent civilians being murdered. It's about bad things happening. To focus on the handful of people who were rescued - on the small glimmer of light - just seems dishonest. And I know my reaction is perverse, because after all these are true stories and deserve to be heard too. But I can't get rid of the sneaking suspicion that Oliver Stone has handed us a security blanket when what I, for one, really want is for someone to shake me up and help me make sense of what happened.

WORLD TRADE CENTER is on release in Canada, the US, Italy, France, Mexico, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Israel, Portugal, Thailand, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Austria, Brazil, Spain, Turkey and the UK. It opens in Australia, Slovenia, the Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Singapore, Sweden, Japan, Greece, Italy, Argentina and Hong Kong in October. It opens in Egypt, Chile and Vietnam in November 2006.

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING - brilliantly biting satire

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING is a hysterical satire on corporate spin-doctors, political correctness and Hollywood. It is an intelligent, adult comedy and the funniest movie I have seen since GRIZZLY MAN. If you like your humour dark and twisted then this is the flick for you, for while it may teeter on the brink of saccharine in the final five, it manages to stay on the right side of the divide.

The concept is brilliant. Our hero is a corporate spin-doctor for Big Tobacco called Nick Naylor. Nick hangs out with his chums who defend Alcohol and Firearms respectively. He promotes cigarettes because he is good at it and he has a mortgage to pay. Okay, Nick may feel bad when he has to give the real-life Marlboro Man a cool million to shut up about his cancer, but at the end of the day, Nick still gets an adrenaline rush from knowing precisely which buttons to press to get him to keep the phat cash. The genius of the script is that our hero is not an amoral aberration but by far the most sane and endearing man in a system that is full of hypocrisy and grand-standing. From puffed-up Senators to professional campaigners to journalists - everyone is in it up to their eye-balls.

For example, a good chunk of the movie features Nick trying to broker a deal with a major Hollywood agent to get stars smoking on screen again. This is, for me, by far the funniest strand of the movie, and its clear that writer-director Jason Reitman knows whereof he takes the piss. I love the spoof of the Japanese-style office building. I loved Adam Brody as the hipper-than-hip, personal assistant, and I thought that casting Rob Lowe as the evil agent was a master-stroke. In fact, Rob Lowe could well replace Alec Baldwin as my all-time favourite sleazy cameo actor. But then this is a cast chock-full of brilliant actors: Aaron Eckhart,Maria Bello, David Koechner, William.H.Macy, Cameron Bright, Sam Elliott and Robert Duvall.

In fairness, this movie isn't perfect. Toward the end, there is a suspicion that it is slightly pulling its punches. But for political satire it's either this or TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE. And, to my mind, while TEAM AMERICA has the songs, THANK YOU FOR SMOKING has Katie Holmes suffering nationwide humiliation! Go see it.

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING showed at Toronto 2005 and was released in the US in April. It is currently on release in the UK and hits Austria on July 28th, Germany on August 31st and France on September 13th.

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE - Best film of 2005

This review is posted by guest reviewer, Nik, who can usually be found here......

David Cronenberg's A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE is without doubt the best film of the year 2005. It combines suspense, a wonderful but not overly complicated plot, absolutely outstanding acting, good production values and sparing but sensitive dialogue. I seem to have developed a recent reputation for the cynical panning of seemingly worthy movies, especially in my criticism of Woody Allen's underwhelming MATCH POINT, so such a ringing endorsement of a film should rightly been considered exceptional from my pen.

Let's start with the acting. Viggo Mortensen, best known as Aragorn, is brilliant as the mild-mannered Tom Stall. His performance only improves as the plot continues to thicken, and Stall's character takes on new dimensions as his past is revealed. His wife, Edie Stall, played by Maria Bello, is utterly convincing as the small town sweetheart whose life gets turned upside down by the bloody attempted robbery of her husband's cafe-diner. However, it is their performance together as husband and wife that is particularly noteworthy - and especially in a memorable sex scene of such vivid and captivating realism that I was actually embarassed to watch. Their relationship is central to the plot - and so strongly acted as to totally immerse the viewer.

The male and female lead are equally well supported by the psychotic-looking Carl Foggarty, played by Ed Harris - who excels in his role as villain - and Ashton Holmes as Jack Stall - son to Tom and Edie and victim of schoolyard bullying. The way that Holmes handles the character development of Jack - and the way that development is juxtaposed with that of his father - is masterful and shows immense promise for a young actor.

Next, the plot and dialogue both pull off the trick of being hugely powerful but quietly understated at the same time. Whereas many modern movies attempt to compensate for a lack of originality through overly-complex plot or timelines, and sharp, witty dialogue - A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE relies on a fairly simple plot, realistically acted and developed, with dialogue that says enough but not too much, and action in proportions that are strictly necessary. That's not to say it's boring - it's never that - rather the relationships between the characters, and the dark history that the film unfolds sustains an incredible tension in the audience. Noone was talking during this one - you could have heard a pin drop - and that made the action, when it came, all the more thrilling.

Finally, the film is wonderfully shot - the camera gets it just right in every scene - capturing the expression, the mood, the feeling of the moment perfectly. The locations are spot on - and it goes to show that you don't need millions of dollars and endless special effects to make a great movie. It makes such a refreshing change to see a Hollywood picture reject explosions, gun fights and CGI and get back to the basics of capable acting and strong characterisation. It's not a thrill a minute, that's for sure - and the kids won't understand it until they're older - but you get plenty of bang for you buck.

If you've yet to see a HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, look it up right now, and beg, steal or borrow whatever you need to get to your local cineplex and hire a seat. Perhaps I'm just a member of the hysterical conservative right, but this is a truly worthy film, and it saddens me that it will be passed over for awards in favour of lesser films that just happen to be about homosexuals. It's okay to be gay, but it doesn't mean you deserve an Oscar - and anyway, it's better to be violent.

HISTORY OF VIOLENCE is still playing in a few cineplexes but is also available of Region 1 DVD. It is released on Region 2 DVD on March 27th 2006.