MAY DECEMBER** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Day 4

Todd Haynes' latest film fails to ignite. What's the point of setting up such a grungy nasty little tabloid scandal, complete with melodramatic music and Chekhov's hunting rifle, if you aren't going to truly mine the emotional gore?  Instead, we get a limp, anaemic relationship drama, enlivened only by the occasional caustic barb from the matriarch (SALTBURN vibes, anyone?) but one that ultimately wastes great performances from its twin leads of Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman.

Moore stars as the deeply delusional and manipulative Gracie, now 60. She lives with her husband and three nearly grown kids. The twist is that Gracie, when 36, seduced aforementioned husband when he was ijust 13 (although British audiences may fail to grasp just how young a seventh grader is for most of the running time.)  Over twenty years later there is no sign that Gracie realises that she has done anything wrong, and her husband seems to be living in a state of arrested development, more elder child than partner.  So much so that I spent much of the film trying to figure out if Charles Melton was a bad actor or just directed to look simple.

The family's fake-we're-fine lives are upturned when Natalie Portman's TV actress comes to town to research an upcoming movie.  In her own way, Portman's Elizabeth is just as fake and manipulative as Gracie, except she is more self-aware of why she is behaving the way she does.  It's a great role for Portman who gets to show us her subtle manipulations.  Portman also has a fantastic monologue straight to camera that is as good as anything she has done since BLACK SWAN.

I just felt that all of this was wasted in a script by Samy Burch that fails to really go as nasty and melodramatic as it could've done. I wanted more about how a young abused child comes to realise he was taken advantage of, his life thwarted. I wanted more of the kids' reactions to being raised in this weird set-up. I wanted twisted queer frissons between Gracie applying lipstick to Elizabeth.  I was waiting for something, anything to happen, and all I got was a tease. Chekhov's rifle failed to fire. 

MAY DECEMBER is rated R and has a running time of 113 minutes. It played Cannes and London 2023.

JACKIE

JACKIE is a mesmerising portrait of Jackie Kennedy in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of her husband, President John F Kennedy.  It attempts to give us an intimate portrait of one of the most recognisable and yet most enigmatic women in history at both her most vulnerable and strong moments - when she's both dealing with her personal shock and grief, but also struggling to protect the legacy of her husband and to shape his place in history. We are left with a picture of a woman who is intelligent, fierce in her protective instincts, but not above sly manipulation - Jackie as a political player then, equal in her influence to Bobby Kennedy, and a match for LBJ and even General de Gaulle.  We get Jackie famously refusing to change out of her blood-stained clothes for the cameras as well as the less well known fight to have an Abraham Lincoln style full state funeral. But at the same time, we are given a tragic portrayal of just how quickly the machinery of power, rightly but savagely, moves to protect the new President, and just how quickly the old President's wife and children are cast aside.  

Screen-writer Noah Oppenheim's choice to focus on Jackie and to make JFK, who killed him, his actual politics, almost incidental is novel.  But so too is Chilean director Pablo Larrain's decision to tell the story using a complex non-linear structure.  We move back and forth from the assassination to the autopsy to the swearing in to the funeral arrangements to the interview Jackie gives to a journalist where she creates the myth of Camelot.  But even this dizzying back and forth is intercut with flashbacks to Jackie guiding TV viewers through the White House in meticulously re-created awkwardly staged black and white footage, not to mention White House recitals and balls. The vivid primary colours of the times of Camelot - Jackie in stunning ballgowns dancing with her prince, make a stark contrast with the dun-coloured scenes of Jackie alone in the White House after his assassination, and sitting in the dreary rain-soaked country house to give her interview.  Kudos to Larrain and editor Sebastian Sepulveda for managing to pull off this complex construction while but not losing the viewer. 

PLANETARIUM - BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Day 9

There once was a Romanian Jew called Bernard Natan who came to France and took over the legendary Pathe cinema studio.  He was the pillar of the movie industry - a man of power and taste. He even had an air of scandal about him - rumours abounded he had directed, and maybe even starred in, hardcore porn.  But when the Nazis came, power and influence did not protect him. He was accused of fraud, thrown into prison, and released only to be handed over to the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz. This could have made an exceptionally interesting movie, a little like CABARET in contrasting the carefree hedonism of the glamorous set with the rise of fascism just at the corner of our vision.  But that is, sadly, not the film that Rebecca Zlotowski chose to make.  Rather, she takes elements of Natan's life, recasts them, and mixes them in with elements of spiritualism and science for a film that contains far too many ideas and not enough focus.

JANE GOT A GUN

JANE GOT A GUN is a troubled film. The original director Lynne Ramsay either quit or was fired over differences with the producer the day before shooting was meant to start, prompting celebrated DP Darius Khondji and Jude Law to quit in solidarity. Earlier, Michael Fassbender got waylaid with an X-Men movie causing a last minute switch in casting.  And so the movie found itself in the hands of no-name director Gavin O'Connor (PRIDE AND GLORY), DP Mandy Walker (RED RIDING HOOD) who bathes every scene in sepia tint sunset to the point of banality.  The resulting film is dreary and emotionally uninvolving, grinding its way to the inevitable and absurdly buoyant conclusion.

Natalie Portman plays the titular heroine.  In the framing story her husband Ham is shot by the gang he used to belong to and she decides to arm up and get help from her neighbour,  Dan Frost.  Together they await the investable battle against Ewan McGregor's gang, having prepared with some A-Team style defences.  In the flashback story we learn that Jane and Dan used to be engaged, but he went off to the Civil War and after long delays returned to find her married to Ham.  We then discover her side to the story, which is pretty predictable.  It's the kind of film where the good guys have perfect teeth and clean skin and the baddies have rotten teeth.  The acting is undercut by the three lead actors' shaky attempts at a Western accent. 

JANE GOT A GUN has a running time of 98 minutes and is rated R. The movie was released earlier this year in Germany, France, the USA, Kuwait, Philippines, Greece, Cyprus, Singapore, Russia, Indonesia, Thailand and Israel. It is currently on release in the UK and Ireland. It opens on May 6th in Spain, May 19th in Macedonia and October 22nd in Japan.

THOR: THE DARK WORLD

Hi honey, I'm home! After nearly a month's movie detox after the BFI London Film Festival, I'm back with a review of what is arguably the final in the long tail of summer blockbusters or the first in the holiday season - THOR: THE DARK WORLD aka THOR 2.

I've always found Thor to be one of the least exciting of the Marvel heroes - a quite literally ham-fisted hammer-wielding macho god improbably in love with an earthling astrophysicist, Jane Foster.  British luvvie Kenneth Branagh got around this portentous Norse nonsense in the first movie by injecting a sense of knowing camp and kitsch that nicely balanced the over-designed mythical space-world of Asgard and the usual Marvel over-loud over-long effects-heavy action sequence.  As much as Kenneth Branagh - champion of Shakespeare - was a left-field choice for THOR, somehow it just worked. Whereas Alan Taylor - mostly a TV director who works on dark character-led dramas - The Sopranos, Mad Men, Game of Thrones - is also a left-field choice who kind of doesn't.  There's none of the kitsch comedy that Branagh brought to THOR in THE DARK WORLD, and the action sequences are dull, ill-conceived and just bizarre in their programming. But I wonder if the problem really lies in the script, penned by Marvel TV writer Chris Yost as well as Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (CAPTAIN AMERICA, which let's not forget benefited from the Joss Whedon running the slide rule over it.)

Their plot hinges on the conceit that the nine realms are about to enter a "convergence" - a planetary alignment that allows matter to pass between worlds or something.  An evil elf (I kid you not) plans to use some WMD called the Aether to cause interplanetary chaos at just this point. Problem is, that space-WMD has been magicked into Thor's girlfriend Jane, and when he takes her to Asgard for safe-keeping, the elves lay waste to his home planet.  He then teams up with his evil brother Loki to defeat the elf, which for reasons not entirely clear culminates in a huge battle in London complete with a seemingly mad Professor Selvig running around with no pants.

The problem with THOR: THE DARK WORLD is that Professor Selvig running round in his pants in pointless but also one of the funniest and most touching parts of the film.  Poor Natalie Portman has very little to do as Jane, basically fainting from the Aether and being rescued. Chris Hemsworth's Thor is all muscly and earnest but as little to do.  And you guessed it - Christopher Eccleston as the evil elf - is all heavy duty make-up, evil stare and, little to do.  The movie is hijacked  - thank the Norse gods - by the tricksy evil brother Loki played with delicious malevolent glee by Tom Hiddleston. He's the only actor given anything to get his teeth into, and is an absolutely magnetic presence - second only to Heath Ledger's Joker as the comic book evil villain par excellence. He injects the film with good humour, ambiguity and true charisma.  It's only a shame there isn't more of him.  I wanted more humour. I wanted more odd-couple comedy - more Thor getting jealous of Jane's human love interest - more of Thor getting on the Tube asking the way to Greenwich - but sadly this movie was too dark and gloomy and bang-shouty to let that in.

THOR: THE DARK WORLD is on release pretty much everywhere except Japan where it opens on February 1st 2014.

THOR 3D - a movie so dull it took me two weeks to work up the energy to review it

THOR is a super-hero movie so simplistic that it makes you feel like BATMAN BEGINS never happened.  I left the theatre bored and patronized.  Not to mention shocked that the director – Kenneth Branagh – who brought us intelligent and subtle readings of Shakespeare – was trading in such trite pastiche.  The movie neither challenges intellectually nor delights visually. It is – both in terms of style and content – an absolute zero.

The plot has two parts to it, but both are hackneyed and predictable. The first part is your typical Oedipal tale of familial jealousy and revenge.  Papa loves big brother (Thor) more than little brother, so little brother gets his revenge by framing big brother and having him exiled before usurping his father’s throne. This all takes place in a Norse superhero world peopled by buff gods in He-Man outfits but decorated by Trump.  There is an inter-world travel-ator which looks like a posh version of the Star Trek transporter and is, shock! horror! to comic book fans, guarded by a black god.  (The only shock I felt was why Idris Elba – so brilliant in The Wire – was slumming it in this dreck). This brings us to the second part of the story, which is basically your typical, predictable fish-out-of-water rom-com, as last seen in Disney’s THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG.  Aforementioned big brother gets exiled to earth where he meets a hot chick who just happens to be an astrophysicist. He learns how not to be an arrogant arse after one night’s deep and meaningful conversation on top of a camper van, and then buggers off to save his world.

The issue here is that the movie is cheap.  It looks cheap and it goes for cheap laughs. Thor is undoubtedly a camp character but then so is Batman. The problem here is that he is also one-dimensional, whereas Batman has nuance and conflict. Thor’s character “development” from idiot-jock to sensitive-hippie is boring because it doesn’t come by stages but rather at the flick of a switch. The  script-writers are simply uninterested in exploring the genre conventions in which they are operating, and to the post-modern viewer, the result is a movie that seems old clunky, simplistic and frankly, just not trying hard enough.  At worst, it feels like pastiche.  There is little point in discussing performances –for what hope do the actors have to dazzle when they are asked to be little more than cardboard cut-outs? Natalie Portman, as the love interest, Jane, simply has to swoon.  Chris Hemsworth, as Thor, simply has to be ridiculous and be-muscled. Anthony Hopkins, as Papa Odin, has to be austere. And poor Tom Huddlestone, used to much finer fair in British independent cinema, is reduced to twirling his pantomime moustaches as little brother, Loki. This cheapens the actors as much as it cheapens the audience. Poor show, all round. 

THOR is on release in all markets bar Japan where it opens on July 1st.

YOUR HIGHNESS - Worst. Spoof. Ever.

YOUR HIGHNESS is an attempt at the kind of broad, slapstick spoof comedy so brilliantly done by Mel Brooks in his classics, YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, BLAZING SADDLES and, to my mind, SPACEBALLS. The first problem is that while often as crude, or indeed cruder, than Brooks, it lacks the consistency of good jokes. The second problem is that it lacks a close observation of the material that it's spoofing. Because, as we all know, a spoof is really a kind of love-letter, and the best spoofs are wonderfully detailed in how they take apart genre-conventions. When you watch YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN you just know that Mel Brooks was a great fan of James Whale. Just as when you watch THE HOLY GRAIL, you know the Monty Python team was immersed in Medieval history at school. But in YOUR HIGHNESS you don't really feel that director David Gordon Greene or writer Danny McBride had a soft spot for epic quest flicks. The plot may have the right feel - two princely brothers go on a quest to rescue the elder's abducted bride to be, and fight wizards and ogres on the way. But the detail is all wrong.

So we are left with a movie that is as much of an embarrassment as the caveman spoof starring Michael Cera and Jack Black, YEAR ONE. In fact, it's worse because the cast is of so much higher quality, and many of them featured in one of my favourite flicks of 2008, PINEAPPLE EXRESS. The humour is broad - which is fine - I'm not a snob for elitist intellectual jokes. But they are not funny, and worst of all they aren't really aimed at the genre they are spoofing. Take an early example. Why does the wise old man who directs the quest with his gift of a compass have to be an alien? What does that add? Nowt. Or further along, why does there have to be a bunch of butt-naked cavewomen types? That's not medieval. It's just an excuse to show some tits. Not that I'm against showing tits - but let's at least attempt to have a genre-appropriate reason! What more can I say? James Franco, Zooey Deschanel and Natalie Portman should be thoroughly embarrassed that they chose to appear in this shit. And producers take note: Danny McBride, just like Zach Galiafanakis, is best used in small doses to spice up a movie, rather than being a lead role in which there juvenile aggressive antics will inevitably grate. And directors take note: improvisation works if you're Mike Leigh. If you are writing a joke-filled spoof, make sure the script is nailed down BEFORE you start shooting.

YOUR HIGHNESS was released in the US and Canada on April 8th and in the UK on April 13th. It will be released in Portugal on April 21st; in South Africa on May 13th; in Turkey on June 3rd; in Malaysia and Singapore on June 23rd; in Hungary, Norway and Sweden on July 8th; in Finland on August 5th; in the Netherlands on August 18th and in France on September 28th.

NO STRINGS ATTACHED

Ivan Reitman, of GHOSTBUSTERS, fame returns to our screens with the kind of contemporary social comedy more typically associated with his son Jason (THANK YOU FOR SMOKING, UP IN THE AIR). The result is a movie that wants us to think it's edgy and honest, but when you cut to the meat, it's still the same old rom-com happy-ending bullshit we've been subjected to for decades.

Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher play two emotionally bruised people who react to their wounds in diametrically opposite ways. The girl becomes emotionally repressed, running from anything that could turn sour and hurt her. By contrast, the boy becomes immensely open and vulnerable, rushing toward people who can't return his emotions. Not automatically the set-up for a rom-com, one might think. But hey-ho, this being Hollywood, the two star-crossed lovers meet cute and decide to have NSA sex. Inevitably, they fall in love. He pushes for a relationship and she runs. One suspects that if Jason Reitman had been directing the film that's where it would've ended. But no. Because, while this film tries to prove how modern and liberated it is with its explicit sexual references and a whole scene devoted to period cramps, essentially it is a conservative project. And this contradiction infects every scene. Thus, while there are some rather funny set-pieces, typically involving the superb supporting cast (Mindy Kalinga, Kevin Kline, Lake Bell, and a brilliantly ditzy Ophelia Lovibond), the movie as a whole just doesn't hang together.

Not only does the film not hang together, it also has the faint whiff of desperation about it. It's desperate for us to love it - for us to think it's cool. In fact, it's about as desperate as the scarily need mono-dimensionally good guy that Ashton Kutcher plays in this flick, not to mention last year's VALENTINE'S DAY. I am genuinely puzzled as to why Natalie Portman, darling of indie flicks since LEON, and soon to be Oscar winner for BLACK SWAN, decided to take a role in this film. And it's even more bizarre when you realise that she actually produced it. And perhaps most puzzling of all - what a bizarre and wasteful way to use Cary Elwes!

NO STRINGS ATTACHED was released in January in the USA and Canada. It is currently on release in Bulgaria, Belgium, Indonesia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Portugal, Finland, Norway, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Netherlands and Singapore. It opens next week in Argentina, Greece, Brazil, Estonia and the UK. It opens on March 18th in Poland; on March 25th in Iceland and Spain; and on March 31st in Slovenia. It opens on April 1st in Sweden; on April 15th in Italy and on April 22nd in Japan.

BLACK SWAN - glorious trash

Darren Aronofsky's much-praised new film, BLACK SWAN, is beautifully-produced trash, and I say that with all respect and admiration. It brings an auteur sensibility to material that is basically a camp psycho-sexual horror flick, in the style of Polanski's REPULSION or Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA. While the material may superficially resemble Powell and Pressburger's seminal ballet melodrama, THE RED SHOES, BLACK SWAN contains none of that film's elegant framing or love for high-art. Rather, BLACK SWAN is the ultimate B-movie - a genre movie that wears its balls-out craziness on its sleeve. The result is beautiful and exhilarating, but I can't say that it affected me as emotionally and as profoundly as Aronofsky's previous film, THE WRESTLER.

In fairness to Aronofsky, the B-movie craziness of BLACK SWAN can be traced back directly to its roots - the ballet Swan Lake - a Gothic melodrama containing elements of body-horror, psychotic doubling and ending in transformative suicide. If that isn't the stuff of a Polanski horror flick, I don't know what is. In the ballet, an evil wizard transforms the innocent princess Odile into a were-swan. The love of the handsome prince should set her free, but her evil doppelgaenger Odette seduces the prince, with results varying depending on which version of the ballet you watch. In the film, Natalie Portman's Nina Sayer has been infantilised by an over-bearing mother (Barbara Hershey). Under pressure to be the perfect "sweet girl" and ballerina, Nina self-harms, is bulimic, has a pathological desire to please, and a psychotic fear of imperfection. When given the role of the Swan Queen, Nina has to bring her innate sexuality, so suppressed by her mother, out into the open, to inform her dancing of the Black Swan. She simply cracks trying to reconcile her mother's expectations of pre-pubescent innocence and her ballet director's (Vincent Cassel) aggressive demands that she be as instinctively sexual as her understudy (Mila Kunis).

What follows is a movie that creates a sense of building tension through the use of claustrophobic interior shots; invasive close-ups; visual trickery with mirrors; and sound editing that suggests an inner self trying to break through. The movie is never pure horror despite plenty of shots involving nail-clipping and skin-scratching.  After all, we never really doubt whether what we are seeing is real or imagined. Nina is shown to be an unreliable witness too early in the movie for that. What we do have is a powerful display of hysteria - but heightened to the point where it is sometimes unintentionally funny (an early scene bedroom scene, for example) and moves so far beyond realism that one feels almost disengaged from it. Nina is less a person to sympathise with than a delicate compendium of every single neurosis that can arise from intensely un-boundaried parenting.

The thematic material in BLACK SWAN is very similar to THE WRESTLER. In both movies we have individuals who are so dedicated to and defined by their profession, that they ultimately sacrifice their physical and mental well-being to it. The Wrestler staples himself and batters himself to entertain, just as Nina breaks her toes and punishes her body. The Wrestler and Nina may be extreme examples of self-destruction, but they hint at the systematic physical abuse that their professions entail. That's why Aronofsky's shooting style is so perfect. By taking the cameras on-stage, by using tracking shots that immerse us in their worlds, Aronofsky is making us look behind the costumes to see the grueling physicality. He wants us to see the sweat, the muscles, the bleeding toes and the broken bones. 

In a sense, Aronofsky is making a bigger point about the demands the entertainment industries make of its professionals, begging the obvious question of how far this applies to his profession, with its pressure to maintain youthful good looks with botox, plastic surgery and aggressive dieting. To that end, one can only view the casting of Mickey Rourke in THE WRESTLER and Barbara Hershey in BLACK SWAN - both self-mutilated by plastic surgery and injury - as provocations. By casting these actors, Aronofsky is himself blurring the line between actor and character - just as Nina can't separate reality from fiction. Similarly, the use of Winona Ryder to play the prima ballerina Nina supplants is inspired. Ryder was a beautiful young actress whose early success morphed into career stagnation and personal humiliation.  Who else better signifies crushing rejection in reality and on screen?

Still, for all the similarity in material, and in the vérité shooting style used in the apartment scenes, to my mind BLACK SWAN is at once a greater and lesser film than THE WRESTLER. It is a greater film insofar as it shows Aronofsky and DP Matthew Libatique in perfect command of vérité shooting style but also able to inter-cut this with its exact opposite - a super-heightened gothic horror shotting style using chiaroscuro and close-ups. It also shows that Aronofsky can do genre cinema with the best of them. But BLACK SWAN is a lesser film insofar as that willingness to leap into melodramatic horror is ultimately a distancing device. Nina Sayers is such a compendium of crazy - under such extreme pressure - that she becomes a device rather than a person. Accordingly, as the film moves into its final act, it is beautiful but it isn't emotionally arresting. Nina's self-destructive tailspin is transfixing, wonderful, crazy and all-consuming - but it never made me feel the visceral hurt that The Wrestler did. That is BLACK SWAN's only flaw - but it is a serious one.

BLACK SWAN played Venice, Telluride, Toronto and London 2010. It opened last year in the US and Canada. It opens this Friday in the UK, Australia, Denmark, Germany, Ireland and Poland. It opens on the 27th in Chile, Greece, Slovenia and Lithuania, It opens on February 4th in the Netherlands, Portugal, Brazil, Iceland and Norway. It opens in France, Singapore and Mexico on February 10th. It opens on February 17th in Argentina, Hungary, Israel, Russia, Estonia and Spain. It opens on February 24th in Belgium, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Finland and Turkey. It opens in Sweden on March 4th, Italy on March 11th and the Czech Republic on April 7th.

THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL is strewn with cowpats from the Devil's own satanic HERD

THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL is an adaptation of Philippa Gregory's historical novel. She portrays the Boleyn and Howard family as eager to advance in wealth and position by pimping out their daughters to Henry VIII. First, Henry knocks up docile Mary, but then casts her aside for her more intelligent and ambitious sister Anne. Her pride piqued by her rejection at the hands of Henry Percy and her family's prior support of Mary, Anne pressures the King into divorcing his true wife, Catherine. But as Queen, Anne's position will only be safe if she can deliver Henry a son.

It's a fantastic story written in clear unpretentious English. Best of all, Gregory manages to balance our base instinctual need for trashy romance and a happy ending with a more profound depiction of a society where women were chattel, and those who made their own way were liable to be seen as abominations.

The movie, however, is problematic.

The problems start with the script. Peter (of THE QUEEN fame) takes an intellectually superior work of historical fiction and strips it of any subtlety. He leaves behind a work that is much reduced - in terms of scope, motivations, credibility and enjoyment. The novel made the relationship between the two sisters more complicated. Yes, there were jealousies and rivalries but there was also a shared commitment to success and wrongs on either side. By contrast, the film has Mary as a pantomime do-gooder heroine and Anne as a malicious little whore. (Anne's relationship with Henry Percy is so quickly skated over that we have no time to see her softer side. It's also ironic to see Anne portrayed in the first half of this film almost as maliciously as she would have been portrayed at the time. So much for historical revisionism in a post-feminist world!) The motivations of Henry VIII are rendered especially opaque and Peter Morgan creates a particularly crass scene in which Henry rapes Anne. This strikes me as a particularly lazy and insidous short-hand. The mechanics of how Anne comes to be accused of being a witch are also reduced to a crude and obvious incest charge - a theme that is handled with far more subtlety and intrigue in the novel.

Finally, the most grave charge against Peter Morgan's adaptation is slovenliness. He introduces themes only to leave them hanging in the air. A classic example is that we are introduced to Mary's husband William Carey. He sort of disappears and then before we know it William Stafford is offering to take care of her. The informed viewer will realise that Carey has died in the interval, but Peter Morgan doesn't bother passing on this information. Morgan also allows a couple of lines of jarringly anachronistic dialogue to creep into the script. So, one moment we are talking of "piss-pots". The next, we're being asked to "look on the bright side". Morgan also makes the Boleyn's mother, Lady Elizabeth, the voice of feminist dissent. This is rather patronising. I think I might have worked out the social importance of the film without having a character precis it for me.

The director and cinematographer, Justin Chadwick and Kieran McGuigan, do little better, making choices that reduce their film to a cheap bodice ripper with no self-respect. From the start, the movie is drenched in a warm honey glow - soft-focus love scenes and dappled sunlight that renders the actors faces orange in the interior scenes. This is so starkly in contrast to the aggressively modern, grimly real look of Chadwick's BLEAK HOUSE that one can only assume that the critically acclaimed BBC adaptation was a success because of fine editing and production design rather than its direction. Or maybe Chadwick was hamstrung by producers and marketing departments going for a "heritage" TV look and a simple tale of sibling rivalry?

There's little joy in front of the camera. Scarlett Johansson (Mary Boleyn) doesn't so much act as look doe-eyed and slow-witted. Natalie Portman (Anne Boleyn) is the better actress. At least, she is very good at working herself up into fits of hysteria. Her mastery of the English accent is less certain. Jim Sturgess (George Boleyn) looks uncomfortable and inadequate. David Morrissey (the Duke of Norfolk) delivers his lines in a modern style that stands out from the self-conscious affected period melodramatics of the lead actress. Accordingly, he seems mis-cast, or at least misdirected. Eric Bana (Henry VIII) is a fine actor but Peter Morgan's script doesn't offer him much opportunity to portray the complexities and gravity of Henry VIII's decisions. There is some compensation in the smaller roles. Mark Rylance (Sir Thomas Boleyn), Kristin Scott Thomas (Lady Elizabeth Boleyn) and Benedict Cumberbatch (William Carey), all do brilliantly well is largely under-written parts.

Finally, what more can one say than that this movie is a dreadful disappointment?

THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL is on release in the US, Netherlands, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Spain, Egypt, Russia, Germany and the UK. It opens later in March in Australia, South Korea and Iceland. It opens in April in France, Singapore, Belgium, Israel and Italy. It opens in May in Brazil; in August in Norway and in Finland on Septmeber 12th.

A partial review of MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS

Wong Kar Wai has made some great movies in the past, not least the pantheon film, IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE. His movies are known for their lavish attention to production design; beautiful women in stunning dresses and the mesmerising control of Christopher Doyle's cinematography. They also contain some out the great performances of Asian cinema, not least Tony Leung in IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE and 2046. Sadly, MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS, his first English-language, American-set movie, is a travesty. In fact. I walked out of MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS after forty-five minutes. I had wanted to leave after ten minutes, but willed myself to keep sitting there, hoping that the movie would pick up. It didn't.

The problems are manifold. The script has no narrative drive; characters speak in banalities; Norah Jones, Rachel Weisz and David Strathairn over-act; one suspects that Norah Jones actually cannot act; Jude Law can't maintain a Northern English accent; Rachel Weisz can't do a Southern American accent; Darius Khondji's cinematography is deliberately stylised but looks cheap and amateurish (how many ways can you film someone through a window or reflected in glass, or shot from a CCTV camera?).....Net result: I had zero interest in continuing to watch Norah Jones' heartbroken waitress drifting through different bars, moping at various uninteresting characters.

Essentially, this is a movie that is badly written, badly acted and badly filmed.

MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS opened Cannes 2007 and was released in Canada, Finland, France, Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands, Greece, China, Singapore and Estonia in 2007. It opened earlier in 2008 in Hong Kong, Latvia, Turkey, Russia, Switzerland and Bulgaria. It is currently on release in the UK and opens in March in South Korea, Colombia, Argentina, Italy, Brazil and Japan. Finally, it gets a limited release in the US on April 4th.

Kids flick preview 2: MR MAGORIUM'S WONDER EMPORIUM

MR MAGORIUM'S WONDER EMPORIUM is a beautifully imagined and rendered movie about a magical toyshop and the people who work there. Dustin Hoffman is love-able and wise as the old toy-maker and Natalie Portman is typically charming as his assistant Molly Mahoney. Young Zach Mills is truly impressive as the quirky kid who spends all day playing with toys there. Even Jason Bateman is impressive in an uncharacteristically restrained role as a buttoned-down accountant. But the real star of the show is the Wonder Emporium itself. Its the craziest most fantabulous toy store you could ever imagine, with beautiful magic toys bursting out of every corner and kids actually allowed to play with them!

The problem with the movie is that is rests too heavily on its only theme. Mr Magorium is not long for this world: hence the accountant is brought in to tot up the value of the shop for Mahoney's inheritance. The prevailing theme of this children's theme is, then, death and grieving, and the idea that it is best to honour the lives of those we love by moving on and living our own lives rather than grieving indefinitely. In addition, we need to believe in ourselves. This is all good stuff and the film delivers this adult subject matter sensitively to its target audience. The problem is that there simply isn't enough richness to the character development or genuine suspence to sustain the already slim run-time. It's pretty obvious from the start that Mahoney will find the courage to take on her inheritance and that the accountant's heart will soften, echoing Helm's script for STRANGER THAN FICTION. So, maybe one for DVD...?

MR MAGORIUM'S WONDER EMPORIUM is on release in Brazil, Canada, Taiwan, Turkey, the US, the Philippines, Israel and Poland. It opens next week in Germany, the Netherlands, and on December 13th in Australia, Russia, Singapore, Spain and the UK. It opens later in December in South Korea, Belgium and Hong Kong. I topens in Belgium and Hong Kong at the end of January 2008 and in Norway, Italy, France, Egypt and Japan in February. It opens in Finland in March.

THE DARJEELING LIMITED should take its own advice

"Stop feeling sorry for yourself. It's highly unattractive."

I was non-plussed by THE DARJEELING LIMITED when I watched it at the London Film Festival. Because I had previously enjoyed many of Wes Anderson's films, I thought maybe my non-reaction was due to cinematic overload in the preceeding fortnight. So I decided to give the flick another shot after a suitably relaxing Thansgiving break had put me into a more receptive mood. Sadly, even after a second viewing, I have to report that Wes Anderson is, to my mind, a director offering diminishing returns.

His new movie, THE DARJEELING LIMITED, treads familiar ground. So much so that THE ONION spoofed his style brilliantly last month. The production design consists of interiors over-stuffed with meaningful objets and the characters wear tailor-made suits and carry bespoke luggage. We are in the ranks of the over-privileged and self-indulgent. The camera draws attention to itself by switching between static symmetric framing; sudden changes of focus; and the jarring use of slo-mo (usually to a vintage Kinks sound-track.) There is an absent father figure and a beloved but somehow distant mother. There are siblings who are struggling to deal with each other and their parents. There is a troubled boy, played by a Wilson brother, who attempts suicide.

In previous, better films, Wes Anderson used this set-up to create characters that were memorable and love-able. He brilliantly articulated the dynamics of family relationships but also provided light relief throught witty banter and improbable situations. His movies have always looked deliberately designed but pre LIFE AQUATIC, they also had heart.

THE DARJEELING LIMITED is, by contrast, a deeply boring, unengaging and alienating experience. Three self-obsessed, self-pitying brothers cross Rajasthan by train, feigning interest in spiritual enlightenment but skating on the surface of things. Anderson doesn't so much satirise the dumb, luxury-lined tourist as simply present him for our consideration. As a result, where we should have laughed at, and with, our protagonists, we find ourselves bored by their emotional ugliness. Surely, it must be possible to make a movie about superficial people on a dull journey that is not of itself superficial and dull?

As dull as this movie is, it might have been forgiveable were it not for one serious mis-step. This centres on Wes Anderson's use of a tragic event as a deus ex machina. His exploitation of an Indian tragedy to facilitate a change in the American protagonists is woefully exploitative, in that he never pays any attention to the impact of this event on the Indian characters. They are merely authentic background details. And this brings me to a wider inconsistency in the piece. For much of this movie, Anderson implicitly criticises superficial tourists who do not engage with the places they travel in and, specifically in the case of India, see it as a means to their own spiritual enlightenment rather than a worthy subject of study in itself. But, on the other hand, Anderson is guilty of exactly the things he is criticises. India is no more than a facilitator that is lightly skated over.

Finally, Anderson's sheer lack of humility is infuriating. Given how generally tedious, emotionally dry and morally vacuous this movie is - how completely unengaged with India - Anderson's musical nod to Satyajit Ray appears presumptuous in the extreme.

THE DARJEELING LIMITED played Venice and London 2007. It opened in Canada and the US earlier this year and is currently on release in the UK, Brazil, Denmark, Sweden, Australia and Norway. It opens in December in Denmark, Sweden, Australia and Norway and in January in Germany, Singapore, Italy, Spain, Russia and Iceland. It opens in Estonia, Turkey and the Netherlands in February and in Japan, Argentina and France in March. It opens in Finland in April 2008.

GOYA'S GHOSTS - less than the sum of its parts

Another day, another Pantheon director disappoints. Today it's the director of the truly great films ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, AMADEUS, MAN IN THE MOON and THE PEOPLE VERSUS LARRY FLYNT - Milos Forman. In each of these films, Forman brought a great character from history or fiction to life. The enigmas were explored and memorable cinema was created. In GOYA'S GHOSTS we have neither. Indeed, Goya remains a rather shadowy and frustrating character - naive, flaky, rather on the outskirts of the great events he is witness to. If the brutality of the Spanish inquisition, Napoleonic invasion of Spain and subsequent English invasion find their way into his work, we do not feel this emotional experience through the film. Indeed, were it not for the brutal sketches shown in the opening credits, one might be left wondering what all the fuss was about. What we are left with is a sort of watered down version of the dilemma of the artist, as shown to devestating effect in AMADEUS. We see Goya crawl to Royal patrons while simulateneously depicted them with unflattering truthfulness. But Forman handles this theme with a heavy-hand, self-consciously spoofing the relationship between Mozart and Joseph II in AMADEUS.

With Stellan Skarsgard's Goya an insubstantial and peripheral figure, where does the movie find its intellectual and emotional centre? The aim is surely to situate it in the relationship between Natalie Portman's Ines and Javier Bardem's Brother Lorenzo. Ines is a victim of the Spanish Inquisition and Lorenzo takes advantage of her in prison. Fifteen years later he has quite forgotten her in his success as a Napoleonic bureaucrat. When Goya drags in the now quite physically and emotionally disfigured Ines, Lorenzo packs her off to an asylum and tries to pack his illegitimate and politically embarassing daughter (also played by Portman) to America. This plot has more than a little in common with the Villefort plot in The Count of Monte Cristo.

I found this storyline rather unsatisfying. It is too fractured and pushed around by the political turmoil in the foreground and the frantic covering of so much thematic material. First we have the venality of the Church. Then the battle between science and religion. Religious fundamentalists are clearly bad. Torture is even worse - and the political allegory with Abu Ghraib is obvious. The invading Napoleonic troops are promised that the Spaniards will greet them with cheers and embrace freedom. This is clealy meant to mirror the American mission in the Iraqi war. Political regimes tumble over one another - yesterday's leaders are today's prisoners. There doesn't seem to be much meaning in any of it - and perhaps that is Forman's point.

Whatever Forman's ultimate vision for the film, it remains a confused and baggy monster whose many themes and plot machinations cannot disguise the lack of charismatic central character or tight plotting.

GOYA'S GHOSTS was released in Spain, Germany and Austria in 2006 and in the zech Republic, Poland, Israel, Sweden, Greece, Finland, the Netherlands, Serbia and Italy earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK and opens in Slovenia, Norway an d Belgium later in May. It opens in the US on July 20th, in France on July 25th and in Brazil on Septeber 7th.

V for VERY SILLY but still some good whistles and bangs

Reactions to V for VENDETTA seem poles apart: in general, the respected critics hated it but movie-goers are loving it. I guess I fall somewhere between the two poles. My first reaction was huge disappointment. In an Orwellian future, the UK is controlled by a fascist government, headed up a Big Brother-like Chancellor played by the marvellous British actor John Hurt.* Hugo Weaving plays "V", a terrorist who blows up Government buildings. V saves a young girl called Evey, played by Natalie Portman, (the stripper in CLOSER and Queen Amidala in Star Wars I thru III) and she eventually joins his cause. So far, so fantastically interesting. You have to love any movie that sends up an authoritarian "Chancellor", and attacks a fascist government that infringes upon our civil liberties. I never thought that a Hollywood that cannot quite bring itself to give a gay movie the Best Picture Oscar would make a movie that portrays terrorists as heroes! I'm loving the controversy and the honest exploration of the duties that fall on a citizen in the face of a repressive society.

However, the depression kicks in when you realise that the convoluted plot has more holes in it than Rab C Nesbitt's string vest. In addition, the film is populated by a bunch of high-class British character actors. Now, this is, of course, a good thing for international audiences. But for us Brits it can jar when we are expected to accept establishment boffin Stephen Fry as an instrument of sedition. He hosts the BAFTAs!

Anyways, I watched this movie again yesterday with altered expectations and realised that I had been way too harsh. If you just want a large dollop of popcorn-style trashy entertainment, you could do worse than see V. It has all the requisite whistles and bangs, as you would expect from a movie written by the guys who gave us The Matrix and the directed by the First AD on The Matrix and Star Wars II. In addition, the whole thing is wonderfully camp, and teeters on the brink of BATMAN AND ROBIN kitsch-tastic status. I can't take it remotely seriously, but then I do not think I am meant to. (Unlike Syriana, which wanted to be taken seriously but was still hillariously twee in its rendering of the Middle-East conflict.)

V for VENDETTA was shown at Berlin 2005 and is now on release in the US, UK, Germany and Austria. It hits France on April 19th 2006. *Amusing that Winston Smith has been resurrected as Big Brother. Kind of like when the People's Republic of Sheffield's David Blunkett turned up twenty years later as the most repressive Home Secretary in post-war British history.

The decline and fall of the STAR WARS franchise

I am the kid in class who knew the script of the original Star Wars trilogy backwards and I still have the Millennium Falcon sitting on top of my wardrobe. So it’s hard for me to review any Star Wars flick with reasoned objectivity. However, in the light of the release of the final Star Wars flick, I want to take a moment to consider what was so good about the original trilogy and what has gone wrong with the recent films. I am assuming, here, that you all know the basic plot and characters. But for any of you who don’t, there is a full plot summary at the end of this post. Needless to say, it is spoiler-tastic.

To my mind, what makes the first trilogy so resonant is the three-in-one mix of mythic/pagan archetypes; a Christian story of redemption; and a fully realised, limitless fantasy world. The gospel may be The Greatest Story Ever Told, but Star Wars amps it up by setting it in a galaxy far, far away, with weird-ass creatures, cool weaponry and cultural references from Samurais to Nazis. The acting may have been wooden and the dialogue ropey, but when you have a story arc this engaging and larger-than-life characters, who’s complaining? My theory is that in the new trilogy, Lucas undermines each of these three supporting features in a manner that leaves the shoddy dialogue and acting exposed. In addition, there is a fourth problem with the new trilogy, which I suspect is simply unavoidable.

Let’s start with the first point. I think the new trilogy is less engaging than the old because we have less archetypal characters and more fillers. In New Hope, Empire and Jedi, you could count the key characters on one hand (Luke, Han, Leia, R2D2, C3PO and Vader) and the secondary characters on the other (Chewie, Yoda, Obe-Wan, Jabba & The Emperor). All these people had well-defined personalities and relationships and were instantly memorable. In the second trilogy a couple of these guys reappear but as shadows of themselves, both in terms of characterisation on the page and the actors’ performances. Hayden Christiansen gives an inept performance as Anakin/Vader. Instead of portraying a man whose soul is corrupted, he just comes across as a petulant teen. Ewan MacGregor pastiches Sir Alec Guinness’ performance as Obe-Wan, which was itself a lazy performance. He is egged on by a script that transforms Obe-Wan into a Han-like Bond-with-a-beard. As for the the new characters, these vary from the insufficiently drawn (Mace Windu) to the racially offensive (Jar-Jar Binks). Indeed, one of the tragedies of the new trilogy is seeing an actress like Natalie Portman perform terribly, not least in the laugh-out-loud birth scene at the end of Revenge of the Sith. Only Ian McDiarmid as Senator Palpatine manages to rise above the mere dialogue and give a performance of diabolical subtlety.

The second problem concerns the use of Christian motifs. The beauty of the original trilogy is that the plot has taken us to a point where the Republic has fallen into decay and its religion has gone the way of the Jedi. Overt religious references are largely limited to, “may the Force be with you,” which mirrors the Christian “Peace be with you”. However, the subtext of the original trilogy is full of subtle references to Christian themes, aside from the more obvious plot strand which has Luke redeeming his father. For insatnce, just before firing a shot on the Death Star, Luke switches off his targeting device and “trusts in the Force.” The key point here is that the religious imagery is pushed on the audience so far but no further: there is no simple allegory. Better still, the precise nature of the Force is left vague. The Jedi are enigmatic and attractive. By contrast, in the second trilogy, a lot of this material is pushed further. Instead of resonating with Christian themes, the new trilogy adopts them in a clumsy, vulgar manner. A case in point is the assertion that Anakin was the result of a virgin birth. This is made all the more absurd because in the same breath, it is revealed that one can have a sort of blood-test for “midi-chlorians” or whatever, that indicate one’s ability to use the Force. So, on the one hand, the Jedi are genetic freaks? On the other, this is meant to be some sort of mystical conception? Make up your mind!

This brings me to the third point, which concerns the brilliantly imagined, fantasy world that Lucas creates. In the original trilogy, Lucas succeeds in imagining a number of different backdrops for the foreground action – from seedy cantinas on outer-worlds, to gleaming anti-septic battle ships, to asteroid belts. Each world has its specific hardware, life-forms, languages and costumes. The master-stroke is that the worlds look inhabited. Emperors may have shiny new star-ships, but rebels have visibly battle-scarred pieces of junk. You also have to applaud Lucas for having the balls to make a number of his characters speak languages we cannot understand – notably, R2D2 and Chewbacca. This builds up the credibility of the world we are watching. I love the fact that we infer what these characters are saying from the other characters’ reactions. One of my biggest criticisms is that, starting in Return of the Jedi but continuing in the new triology, we see the rising use of subtitles, which never fails to take me out of the movie.

However, my biggest criticism regarding the production design is that the visual purity of the original trilogy is diluted in the new trilogy. In A New Hope we had the clearly defined and contrasting yellow desert wastes of Tatooine and then the clinical white and black of the Death Star. In Empire Strikes Back we had the remorseless white ice planet of Hoth contrasted with the misty, brown-green swamp of Dagobah and the pastel Cloud City. In Return of the Jedi, once again we have desert waste followed by lush green of Endor and clinical Death Star. In each case these worlds are clearly defined with broad visual tokens – the backdrop is not cluttered or over-designed – I suspect largely because of budget and technical limitations. By contrast, in the new trilogy, each world is over-designed to the point of bewilderment. The mis-use of computer graphics leaves the eye nowhere to rest and distracts us from the beauty and originality of this star-ship or that costume. Nowhere do we have an iconic style moment similar to Princess Leia’s in New Hope or an iconic new weapon or ship. Yes, it’s neat to see a double-ended light-sabre, but before we can get excited about it, it gets trumped by a droid with four arms and four weapons!

Each battle is more complicated in its choreography and effects than the next, and the whole thing reminded me of that line from the Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy about believing eight impossible facts before breakfast. (I paraphrase.) I struggle to think of any confrontation that can match the fatal duel between Darth Vadar and Obe-Wan Kenobi in New Hope, or the final duel between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vadar and Return of the Jedi. These were impressive because of the beauty of the sword-fighting but also because there was so much at stake emotionally. In the first, we have martyrdom; in the second, redemption. No amount of multiplication of light-sabres can compensate for the dramatic vacuity of the battles in the new trilogy. (My riposte to people who say I should just relax and enjoy the spectacle.) Of course, there is one duel in the new trilogy that could have matched both the style of the original duels and the dramatic weight – that is the duel between Anakin Skywalker and Obe-Wan Kenobi at the end of Revenge of the Sith. After all, the stakes are Anakin’s soul, not to mention whether the Republic remains free or becomes an Empire. However, George Lucas makes a pigs ear out of this scene, with dialogue more than usually absurd and the duel resolved not by the flick of a sword but by a reverse somersault. Insane!

So, in terms of characters, thematic material and the production design, to my eye the new trilogy desecrates the original trilogy. This is the result of a lot of conscious decisions on the part of the screenwriters, production designers and ultimately, the director. And that is before we get to the glaring plot inconsistencies that bespeak of an indifference to the die-hard fans on the part of the film-makers. Still, moving beyond sins of commission and omission, there is another major problem with the new trilogy that I feel is not the fault of the production team.

A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi were engaging because ordinary film-goers were seeing the story through the eyes of a bunch of under-dogs. From low-level robots to farm-hands and con-artists – the vast majority of the main characters in the first trilogy are ordinary people called upon to be heroes. This is not only romantic, but helps to keep the action down to manageable size. You can empathise more with a bunch of guys trying to Take That Hill than with seeing an mult-planet war played out on a map. The problem with Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith is that, of necessity, the story is de-personalised. After all, the new trilogy takes place at the height of the Republic. So, you can’t have Leia and Han running round the galaxy in a beat-up motor sticking up two fingers to the guys in charge. The good guys ARE the guys in charge. Leia’s mum, Padme, is an elected monarch and then Senator, and the Jedi are not eccentric wise old men living in caves but an inter-galactic Interpol. Indeed, much of the plot involves good and bad guys brokering deals in the Senate and arguing about subsidiarity and trade tariffs. The whole thing is reduced to a cross between Yes, Minister and C-Span – hardly enough to get the pulses racing. As a result, with the exception of the final duel between Anakin and Obe-Wan, most of the fights and chases in the “new trilogy” are padding. They help pass the time, sell toys and provide the basis for video games, but they do not propel the plot. The real nuts and bolts are provided by old men trying to manipulate each other in council chambers.

All in all, I would have rather left Anakin Skywalker’s back story to my own imagination rather than to George Lucas. The entire new trilogy is populated by irritating or vacuous characters uttering ridiculous dialogue, performed badly. The plot is inconsistent with the first trilogy on a number of key points and, as the action is motivated by political deals rather than battles, those battles are simply CGI-porn that carry no emotional weight. While the plot and script are under-cooked, the production design is over-cooked thanks to an egregious use of CGI and a lack of visual purity. However, this does not detract from George Lucas’ achievement in creating the original trilogy. The masterly use of archetypes, religious imagery and spare visuals created a richly imagined world populated by characters that we cared about desperately. Thus, while A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back are in my Movie Pantheon, the new trilogy should be tossed into the Cinematic Trashcan of Shame. (And, if you’re wondering, Return of the Jedi makes for a perfectly good summer blockbuster!)

STAR WARS EPISODE III: THE REVENGE OF THE SITH is on global release. Star Wars Episodes I, II, IV, V and VI are available on DVD. Be careful when buying the original trilogy as the “special edition” contains extra and altered footage which, to my mind, imports the failings of the new trilogy and corrupts the integrity of the original.

Here follows a plot summary for all six movies: The movie is both a micro- and macro-level story about the fall of a good man and his redemption. The quirk is that the redemption story was told in the old trilogy, released between 1977 and 1983. The story of the fall is told in the new trilogy, released between 1999 and 2005. Looked at chronologically, the story opens in The Phantom Menace, the first of the new trilogy. As the story opens, a group of planets are co-existing peacefully, governed by a democratic Senate and policed by warrior-priests known as the Jedi. The Jedi are able to harness “The Force” – an energy field common to all life-forms – that allows them certain physical and mental powers. However, these powers can be used for both good and bad. In the first movie, Senator Palpatine manipulates the Senate into invading one the planet Naboo and electing him Chancellor. Naboo is ruled by a democratically elected Queen, Padme Amidala. In the meantime, a good Jedi named Obe Wan Kenobi helps free a young boy, Anakin Skywalker, from slavery, and takes him on as an apprentice in the way of the force. In the second movie of the new trilogy, Attack of the Clones, Chancellor Palpatine further manipulates the Senate into granting him sweeping emergency powers and initiates the Clone Wars against the rebel Jedi Darth Sidious. Anakin Skywalker and Padme marry in secret. In the third movie, Revenge of the Sith, Padme become pregnant and Anakin prophecies that she will die in childbirth. He is lured to the dark side of the Force by the promise that he will learn how to keep her alive. Thus ensnared, Anakin massacres the good Jedi, and in a duel with Obe Wan suffers massive burns which result in him wearing the iconic body suit and helmet. It is revealed that Darth Sidious and Chancellor, now Emperor, Palpatine are one and the same. He has orchestrated the dissolution of the Republic from the inside. Padme dies in childbirth and her twins, Luke and Leia, are split up and sent into hiding.

Now we jump forward in movie time to A New Hope, the first movie of the original trilogy. Leia is a Princess, Senator & covert leader of a rebel alliance against the Empire. She is captured by Vader and held prisoner upon a new weapon of mass destruction, the Death Star. Luke is a teenage farm-hand who, in a quirk of co-incidence only possible in the movies, intercepts Leia’s distress call in the shape of two droids called R2D2 & C3PO. Luke finds Obe Wan Kenobi who teaches him about the force, but omits to tell him that his father became Vader, or that he has a sister. Luke, Obe Wan and the droids rescue Leia, aided by a smuggler called Han Solo and his co-pilot Chewbacca. Obe Wan is killed by Vader, and the rebels then launch a successful attack on the Death Star. In the second movie of the original trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back, Luke is trained by another old Jedi, Yoda, but abandons his training to rescure Leia, Han, Chewbacca and the droids, who have been captured by Vader and used as bait in a client state run by reformed smuggler, Lando Calrissian. In the escape, Luke learns that Vader is his father and loses his hand. Han is frozen in carbonite and shipped off to gang-leader Jabba the Hutt. In the third movie, Return of the Jedi, Luke, Leia, Lando and the droids rescue Han from Jabba the Hutt. Luke visits a dieing Yoda and discovers he is Leia’s sister. He rejoins Han and Leia to lead an assault a base station for a new Death Star on Endor. They are aided by Ewoks. Luke tells Leia she is her sister and that he is going to the Death Star to redeem Vader. The rebels successfully blow up the base, and Lando leads a strike force in a successful attack on the Death Star proper. Meanwhile, Vader and the Emperor try to turn Luke to the dark side of the Force. Luke refuses so the Emperor starts to kill him. This prompts the necessary redemption: Vader saves Luke, kills the Emperor and then dies. Luke escapes from the Death Star just before it blows up and rejoins his friends on Endor. The Republic can now be restored.

Overlooked DVD of the month - GARDEN STATE

GARDEN STATE is certainly not an overlooked movie if you ask anyone on the festival circuit. In fact, it was one of the most hyped movies of 2004. However, as it received a fairly limited release in the UK, I am taking this opportunity to big it up in advance of its DVD release next week. The movie is a pretty sweet, wistful romantic comedy starring and directed by Zach Braff, of SCRUBS fame. It also features Natalie Portman as his love interest, Bilbo Baggins as his dad and Peter Sarsgaard as his best friend.

The movie is worth watching for a number of reasons. First, it manages to create a wonderfully hopeful yet lamenting tone. This is because it balances some fairly dark material - medication, death, resolving family conflict - with the standard rom-com fare. It features a character called Andrew Largeman, played by Zach Braff, who is hitting that painful part of life when you realise that you are no longer in that cool post-college phase, where you still have stuff at your parent's house and can get away with goofy behaviour. He is now an adult. It's time to work out whether he is being correctly medicated and actually engage with life. These revolutionary thoughts are triggered by his decision to go back to Jersey for his mum's funeral, and the ensuing confrontation with his domineering father. This being a fairly conventional romantic-comedy, Largeman "meets cute" a resoundingly cheerful chick with lots of kooky eccentric Indie-movie habits, and she facilitates his return to real life.

The sound-track of the film is also central to creating the tragi-comic feel of the movie and has become almost more famous and admired than the movie itself. It showcases a bunch of indie bands like Remy Zero and The Shins, while revisiting cult classics like Nick Drake. Which brings to me to my closing point. GARDEN STATE is a neat film and you should be sure to check it out. I really liked it, but I don't think it is The Great White Hope that some have made it out to be. Indeed, it is fairly derivative of movies by Wes Anderson and often-times feels a little self-indulgent. Sometimes you just want to press the fast-forward button, and the final scene is just pure schmaltz and undercuts the earlier edgier tone of the movie. Moreover, the whole issue of taking/addiction to/mis-use of prescription drugs is treated in a fairly off-hand manner. For all these reasons, I don't need to see it again, but I do listen to the soundtrack all the time. And for that, I am happy to have seen the movie.

GARDEN STATE showed at Sundance and London 2004 and was released in the UK last December. It is released on DVD next week.