DISCLAIMER (TV) Episodes 1-3** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 Day 2

There are two different TV shows in Disclaimer with two different sets of performances and two different tones. The show's fatal flaw is that this dichotomy fatally undermines it.

In the first show we have the tragic story of a middle class mother and father learning that their twenty-something son has died in an accident on the Italian coast.  We see the Met police officers devastate their lives with the news, and the identification of the corpse.  Lesley Manville (MRS HARRIS GOES TO PARIS) is stunning in the role of the grief-struck mother, with a rather outmatched Kevin Kline giving support as the father. 

Twenty years later the mother has died but the father has stumbled upon his son's holiday photos showing a romance between him and a young mother.  It turns out that his now deceased wife wrote a novelisation of what she believes happened on that holiday, and how her son died saving this young woman's toddler son. The presumption is that the young mother was a kind of desperate housewife, seducing the young man and then cruelly abandoning the scene of his death.  

In the contemporary storyline the father (Kevin Kline) publishes the novel and sends it, as well as the explicit photos, to the now very successful middle-aged woman (Cate Blanchett) and her family.  Just as Lesley Manville played the story straight, Cate Blanchett gives a deeply convincing portrait of a woman desperately scrambling to keep her luxurious and outwardly perfect life in tact. She is distraught when her own now twenty-something son reads the book and has a rather fraught relationship with him anyway. And the publication of the novel stirs up deep-seated resentments in her husband, who thinks she has put her career before being a mother.  

So that's the serious story. It is well-acted by the two leading ladies, Manville and Blanchett, and beautifully staged.  A scene with the two parents standing in the sea where their son died is particularly haunting.  That said, the precisely curated on-trend luxury of the contemporary house that Blanchett's character lives in reminded me of the kind of miniseries that Nicole Kidman seems to relentlessly star in now. We were one bad blonde wig away from The Perfect Couple.

The problem is that there is a second TV show going on here. And it plays as bad comedy, I hope unintentionally.  Casting Kevin Kline as the vengeful older father is a risk as he brings a mischief to every role.  He needs to be an angel of torment but he comes off as Puck, complete with comedy gestures of throwing a bomb into Catherine's life. It's just tonally off. And as I said, in the flashback scenes he is utterly outmatched by Manville.

The bigger problem is casting Sacha Baron Cohen as Blanchett's jealous husband. He can't help but play the role a little bit bigger than necessary, and of course we as the audience bring our own baggage and expectations seeing him on screen. Maybe the performance won't play as bad on TV when people are watching at home. But in a packed Royal Festival Hall it took one or two people to start sniggering and pretty soon the audience was laughing out loud at his line readings.

Similarly, the audience was laughing at the scenes where the younger version of Blanchett, played by Leila George, is seducing the gap year student. It's unfortunate writing - and maybe it's this way in the book given that it's ultimately his mum's imagination? Which is also creepy AF.  But anyways, it's the most cringe-inducing scene and poor Louis Partridge (ENOLA HOLMES) has to play a feckless boy who is the object of his own humiliation and our laughter. Like I said, maybe this is the point.  Either way it was awful to watch and totally undermined the serious emotional work being done by Manville and Blanchett.

The final fatal blow to this TV series is the intrusive and ham-fisted voiceover from Kline, Blanchett and Baron Cohen's characters.  The latter in particular is just laughably bad. None of them add anything to narrative propulsion. I gather that this is a feature of the novel but it simply does not translate to screen.

As I said, it may turn out that the literal incredible and laughable tone of the seduction scenes is the point. An imagined version of a past that has been hypothesised.  But until the final episode revelations of whatever the truth is, we are stuck with some pretty unwatchable TV. I doubt many viewers will stay the course.

DISCLAIMER started airing on Apple TV today.

BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM

In a world where large swathes of educated people wilfully believe that vaccinations cause autism; and that the Clintons and Bidens are part of an elite paedo ring; and that Covid is a hoax; I am was was really wary of watching a new BORAT film.  Isn't real life already filled with toxic racism, homophobia and misogyny?  How do you satirise bigotry when the entire political discourse of America in 2020 feels like it's gone through the Looking Glass?  But I am so happy that I watched this film, because it's really fucking funny, and really fucking horrifying, and both are important things to experience and acknowledge right now. Because whether or not the White Supremacist in the White House is evicted next January, the attitudes he exposed, the grievances and bigotry he unleashed, the lies he peddled will remain in the public discourse.  We need Borat to help us channel our anger into laughter, but we need to feel angry nonetheless.

Of course, if the world has changed for us, it's also changed for Sacha Baron Cohen. Borat is so recognisable he has a knock off fancy dress costume as seen in this sequel.  So Cohen couldn't actually use the Borat character to lure his bigoted marks into a false sense of security and expose their hatred.  Rather, he has to spend most of the film as Borat dressing up as someone else. And the real heavy lifting is done by the previously unknown but apparently comic genius Maria Bakalova, playing Borat's daughter Tutar. It is Bakalova that exposes the misogyny and sexual perversion at the heart of public life, not least in the coup de theatre that is the final scene where she plays a OAN-style news reporter in mini-dress and blonde wig, buttering up a lascivious Rudy Giuliani, who is all too ready to have a drink with her in a bedroom, let her take off his mike, lie back on the bed and apparently start to masturbate. What an absolute sleazebag. 

Which isn't to say that Baron Cohen/Borat doesn't have some phenomenal scenes himself.  In this sequel, we see Boart released from a long prison stint for embarrassing Kazakhstan's dictator, and sent to America to offer Trump a gift to make sure that he's seen as a friend of Trump in the same way that Bolsanaro and Putin are.  But Borat's daughter Tutar has contrived to be shipped to America instead, so that Borat has to offer HER as a gift. Cue some really queasy discourse about the pornification of young girls, and the appropriate role of women in modern life.  The most awful scenes are probably a tie between an anti-abortion pastor ignoring a case of incest and rape to focus on preventing abortion, and Borat in disguise singing a song to the delight of his bigoted audience as they chant along that their enemies should be given the Wuhan Flu while raising Nazi salutes.

Basically this is a film that makes you sick, but also makes you laugh in the way that maybe only Sacha Baron Cohen can. It's absolutely the film for this moment.

BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM has a running time of 95 minutes and is rated R. It is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7

Aaron Sorkin follows up his directorial debut MOLLY'S GAME with a movie whose subject is far more in his wheelhouse, and what an energetic, pointed, anger-making film he has created in THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7.  Its concerns are those that Sorkin has explored throughout his career:  the liberal fight against injustice, corruption and political repression.  He cast these ideas in a warm-fuzzy light where optimism won in his hit TV show The West Wing. He was angrier and more cynical in The Newsroom.  And in the Trump era, the anger is rightly turned up, and the absurdity of a system wherein the rule of law has been bent out of all recognition fully explored.  

The film opens with a montage that takes us back to the 1960s and the potent combination of the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam protests. We see RFK beg for calm after the assassination of MLK before himself being assassinated. We then zoom in to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.  Protestors flooded into the City hoping to protest Vietnam in front of the media outside the convention hotel soon clashed with the police brutally trying to keep them away.  Once Nixon is elected his regime decides to prosecute the so-called ringleaders of the riots for Conspiracy to Incite Riots and other charges, even throwing in iconic Black Panther Bobby Seale, who had no part of it, for good measure.  The charges were clearly trumped up, the judge (Frank Langella) was clearly biased and bogus, the jury was tampered with to ensure a friendly verdict, and the defendants were clearly there just to be made an example of.

Sacha Baron Cohen is absolutely note perfect as Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman. He gets all the funniest lines because he is most comfortable with showing the absurdity of proceedings.  But it's Eddie Redmayne that has the more interesting role as Tom Hayden - the apparently more sensible, less showy leader of a student protest movement who hates Hoffman's grandstanding. Much of the intellectual back and forth of the movie comes between them as they throw barbs about how best to serve the movement.  And they are joined in a kind of Sorkin Triumvirate of Repartee by Mark Rylance as progressive attorney William Kunstler. It's so clear that the prosecution is bent (despite an ill-conceived attempt to soften Joseph Gordon-Levitt's prosecution attorney) that all the real intellectual fun is to be had in the arguments WITHIN the defense.  

The result is a courtroom drama that is thrilling and rightly anger-making, and a movie where Sorkin's trademark razor-sharp combative dialogue is absolutely right for the job.  But he has also come on leaps and bounds as a director of action. The way in which he reconstructs the riot as he interrogates the version of events that Tom Hayden is telling himself is a visual and editorial tour-de-force.

THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 has been released on Netflix due to Covid. It has a running time of 127 minutes and is rated R.

LES MISERABLES

Helena Bonham Cartier as the devious Madame Thenardier

For the improbable few who don't know, Les Miserable is a remarkable novel by Victor Hugo, set in mid nineteenth century, post-Napoleonic France.  The main character is a good but traduced man called Jean Valjean who lives under an alias to escape his convict past.  He is hunted by Javert, a cop whose strict adherence to the rule of law will not admit mercy or humanity.  In the first half, Valjean is redeemed by the mercy of a priest, witnesses the death of a seamstress turned hooker called Fantine and promises to care for her daughter Cosette. Together they escape Javert in the anonymity of Paris.  In the second half, Cosette falls in love with a revolutionary young aristo called Marius, who is also beloved by the sad little innkeepers' daughter, Eponine. Valjean realises that rather than escape Javert by fleeing to London, he must save Marius from certain death on the barricade. In doing so, he challenges Javert to let him pass with the dying boy, thus fundamentally destroying Javert's worldview and self worth.  Javert commits suicide, and Valjean dies, his family knowing his true worth. 

In the 1980s, the novel was reworked as a musical by Claude-Michel Schoenberg and Alan Boublil. They stripped the Victor Hugo classic of its baggy social exposition leaving the bare bones of a story of young love crossed with a tragedy of redemption versus the rule of law. They also added a handful of truly superb songs and the comic relief of the con-artist inn-keepers, the Thenardiers. The result was a product of memorable songs, and overt sentimentality.  The only character of any real psychological interest was the conflicted Javert.  Even poor Eponine, suffering unrequited love, is so good that she leads her beloved Marius to Cosette.  It is, then, almost uniquely, a movie in which all the major characters are wholly good, and their songs speak to worthy but unfulfilled longing.  There are no song and dance numbers here. It's just torch song after torch song interspersed with the one truly comic number at the inn.

I am conflicted about Tom Hooper's translation of the musical to the big screen.  There is much to be commended.  He forces the actors to sing live during the take, rather than miming to a prerecorded track, giving the movie an emotional authenticity that is entirely novel.  Surely movie musicals can never go back from this new high bar?  Hooper is also unabashedly faithful to the original - capturing its grandeur and melodrama, ringing every last tear from his audience. I doubt any fan of the original will be disappointed with this on-screen translation. Hooper is fortunate in his cast. Hugh Jackman's background in musical theatre is well known and it shines through here with his heartbreaking Valjean. We have seen Amanda Seyfried sing in MAMA MIA! and are unsurprised by her pretty but slightly too trilly soprano.  Anne Hathaway and Eddie Redmayne as Fantine and Marius prove to be highly capable singers too.   The only weak link is Russell Crowe as Javert, but I didn't mind this at all as it is far more important that we believe his psychological deterioration in the final act - an d Crowe sells this well.  Of course, it was predictable that Eponone, played by Sarah Barkman, would be a scene-stealer given her theatrical background, and as usual we get the Papageno/Poor Joe effect with little Daniel Huttlestone as Gavroche.  As comic turns, Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen are predictably superb as the Thenardiers. 

Behind the camera, I love the ambition of Tom Hooper's vision.  The first scene that rises through murky waters to high above a dangerously listing great ship.  The choice of a beautifully ornate Catholic Church on an isolated hilltop for Valjean's conversion.  The use of colour in the scenes with barricades - the red of Enjolras' coat.  The metaphor of having Javert always walk on the edge of the precipice.  I particularly liked the idea of Fantine singing "I dreamed a dream" almost immediately after selling herself for the first time, utterly destroyed and vulnerable.

But there is one directorial choice that I found utterly grating, and for which I think the Academy was right to deny Hooper a Best Director nomination because it is so very fundamental to the success of the film. As I said before, Les Mis is different because the songs are rather uniform. There are no song and dance numbers, and only one out and out comic turn. Rather we have a mix of earnest, heartbreaking torch songs and earnest heartbreaking doomed political chants. Unfortunately, Hooper has chosen not to  vary his style of filming. In general he cuts between camera angles but keeps his camera still and focused, often in extreme close-up, on the singer.  I get this with Valjean's conversion. And I get it for Fantine's big turn.  But for every other song? By the time I got to Marius' "Empty chairs at empty tables" I was desperate for some kind of variation, and this detracted from Redmayne emoting his heart out. This lack of directorial imagination, or perhaps the fixation with a novel idea that was taken too far, is this movie's Achilles Heel.  So that while it works emotionally, and the performances and design impress, as a work of pure cinema, it fails. 

LES MISERABLES is on release in Japan, Australia, Hong Kong, Canada, Singapore, Spain, the USA, Hungary, Malaysia, the Czech Republic, Kuwait, Lebanon, Portugal, Bulgaria, Lithuania, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Ireland, Mexico, the UK and Vietnam.  It opens on January 18th in Estonia, Iceland, Norway and Sweden; on January 25th in Poland and Romania; on January 31st in Italy, Slovenia, Thailand and Brazil; on February 8th in Russia and Taiwan; on February 14th in Cyprus, France, Argentina and Greece; on February 21st in Belgium, Germany and Finland; on March 1st in Turkey and on March 21st in Denmark.

LES MISERABLES is rated PG 13 in the USA and the running time is 157 minutes.

THE DICTATOR

THE DICTATOR is hands down the funniest, cleverest movie Sacha Baron Cohen has ever made.  I was always a bit uneasy at films like BORAT and BRUNO. I felt it was somehow exploitative to frame ordinary members of the public, and the humour too often descended to the most base level. I'm thinking in particular of the scene where Borat hands his charming Southern hostess a bag of what she thinks is his own shit. That isn't satire or even good physical comedy. It's just cruel and crass. Luckily, Sacha Baron Cohen is now so famous that he can't get away with that kind of stunt-movie. The result is his first fully scripted feature - a movie that I feel is more tightly written, better performed, and more politically on point than anything he's done to date. 

Cohen plays a dodgy African dictator in the mould of Gadaffi called Aladeen.  In the opening scenes we see him lording it up in his home state to great comic effect, before journeying to the USA.  His evil sidekick switches him out with his body-double, in order to get at the oil reserves, forcing Aladeen to live a "normal" American life until he can regain access to his entourage.  This allows Cohen to simultaneously take the piss out of Western greedy capitalists and hippie liberals.  The capitalists don't care who rules, or what promises of fake democracy are made, so long as they can get the oil rights. The hippie liberals are so busy being nice and not offended that they can't even take offence when they should, or recognise a fake offer of watered down democracy when they see it.  Everyone has a price.  Love conquers all but doesn't really.  And America is the biggest joke of all - "a country built by blacks and owned by the Chinese" where it's recent history of democracy - wealth redistributed to the rich through the developed world's only regressive tax system; a presidential election decided by judicial fiat; where its ethnic minorities are incarcerated at disproportionately high rates; and citizens are held indefinitely without trial. The skill is that Cohen can make all these subversive assertions but still keep the tone of the film light-hearted and have us consistently laughing out loud.  Kudos.

THE DICTATOR is on release in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, the UK, the USA, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Turkey and Armenia. It opens in Hong Kong on June 7th, Singapore, Brazil, Italy and Taiwan on June 15th, France on June 20th, Spain on July 13th, Argentina, Greece and Colombia on July 20th, Cambodia on July 26th, Mexico on August 10th and Japan on September 7th. 

HUGO

HUGO is a movie about the wonder and beauty of cinema - an elegy to the age of celluloid and hand-made special effects - a plea to preserve the fragile, crumbling history of this fantastic art form.  In this aim, HUGO is a wondrous, magical success.

But, far from being, conservative and nostalgic, legendary film-maker Martin Scorsese has shown us not just the past but the future of cinema.  The nostalgia is matched by an equal wonder at the new technology of 3D - not piss-poor retro-fitted 3D - but delicately aligned, beautifully designed 3D designed to give us that same immersive, spectacular thrill as when those first cinema-goers gasped at the Lumiere Brothers' train arriving at the station.  In this aim - in showing us both the past and future power of cinema, HUGO is a technical achievement that surpasses AVATAR and redefines what we thought was possible with 3D. HUGO is, if ever there was one, a movie that demands to be seen in 3D and on the biggest screen you can find.

HUGO is also meant to be a children's adventure - a physical comedy - a plea not to give up on love, or yourself. In that aim, HUGO is a tedious bore.  

So let's tackle these elements in reverse order. Hugo is the story about a young orphan boy (Asa Butterfield) who lives in a train station in a 1931 Paris heightened by fantasy and stunning production design.  Hugo is a tinkerer - he loves to fix things - in particular the beautiful automaton his father left him.  His love of mechanics lies in his loneliness and his need to find his own place in the world.  Together with a plucky little bookworm called Isabelle (Chloe Moretz), Hugo scampers through the station, stealing little mechanical parts to finish his work, and desperately trying to avoid the station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) and his hound-dog.  These chase scenes through the hidden passages and platforms of the station make up much of the tedious first hour of the film.  The dialogue is minimal, as are the genuine belly laughs. Poor Sacha Baron Cohen does his best, but I get the feeling that Martin Scorsese just cannot direct physical comedy.  Moreover, too many of his chase scenes through the train station are there to showcase the 3D and the spectacular production design but nothing else. They become repetitive.  They don't advance the plot.  The first hour of this two hour film could easily lose forty minutes. 

Then again, let's talk about that 3D and the production design.  Dante Ferretti (SHUTTER ISLAND, SWEENEY TODD) has created a beautifully detailed, rich set that evokes a kind of super-Paris - a Paris as we would all imagine it to be in our wildest romantic moments. Always snowing - couples dancing - accordion music - little plucky girls in berets - steaming croissants -  book shops that groan under the weight of beautifully engraved volumes - the Eiffel Tower always in the background.  All this forms the environment for a kind of 3D cinematography that combines achingly superb attention to detail with Scorsese's trademark breath-taking tracking shots.  The opening scene of this film, where we swoop through Paris, itself a giant automaton, then into the station, along the track, weaving through the crowd until we reach Hugo hiding behind the face of a clock - is a tour de force to match the Copacabana tracking shot in GOODFELLAS.  Martin Scorsese and longtime DP Robert Richardson - both new to 3D - deserve credit for such an achievement - not just in creating a particular look for their own film - but in echoing and recreating some of the seminal scenes of early cinema.

And so to the history of cinema. The second hour of the film, where the children are led through the history of cinema, first from Professor Rene Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg) and then through Melies himself (Ben Kingsley) is just an absolute pure joy for any lover of the artform.  I already mentioned the recreation of the Lumiere Brothers' train scene, but the pivotal recreation is of Melies film, "A Trip To The Moon" - see the Youtube clip below. The movie shows us the joy and wit of those early special effects and spectaculars, and the final montage is a thing of awe and beauty. I defy any film-lover not to start crying at the skilful direction of a scene that is at once a culmination of the technical achievement of the film, and its emotional high-point.

The resulting movie is one that is, as I have said, not without its flaws. The first hour drags, and I do wonder whether children will engage with it.  But for cinema-lovers, the second hour is pure joy and an experience I would happily repeat at the cinema, because this is a movie that assures us that despite the fashion for watching movies on mobile devices - sometimes magic demands a communal experience and a big screen.

HUGO was released last weekend in the USA and Canada. It was released this weekend in the UK and Turkey. It opens on December 14th in France; on December 21st in Belgium; on December 23rd in India; on December 30th in Mexico; on January 5th in Russia; on January 12th in Australia and New Zealand; on January 26th in Israel and Spain; on February 3rd in the Czech Republic, Italy, and Poland; on February 9th in Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands and Portugal' on February 16th in Hong Kong and Brazil; on February 27th in Finland; on March 15th in Denmark, Singapore, Norway and Sweden; and on April 27th in Lithuania.

BRÜNO - Professor007 lays down the wisdom

This review was written by our Austrian correspondent, Professor007

BRÜNO – In your face, but very funny

Arguably, what made Borat so good was not so much the slapstick-like scenes of him mincing around in mankinis or pooing on a sidewalk in Manhattan, but the way in which he managed to bring out the dark sides of otherwise normal-seeming people: the interviewee responding that he would have no problem with Borat shooting jews; the car salesman advising on the minimum speed to run over gypsies in a Hummer; or a crowd cheering when Borat proclaims that George Bush may drink the blood of every man, woman, and child in Iraq. Brϋno, a gay Austrian reporter for fashion show Funkyzeit, has made himself “Aus” of the Viennese fashion circles after causing havoc during a fashion show and leaves his country in order to seek fame in the United States, accompanied solely by his former assistant’s assistant, Lutz. He starts his quest in LA where he consecutively tries and fails to become a film star, a celebrity talk show host and a porn star, in-between hopping rather randomly from Kansas to Alabama with a short detour to the Middle East and Africa, in a rather haphazard storyline. In terms of wit and sarcasm, Brϋno doesn’t quite match his Kazakh predecessor. Granted, there is the scene where a human rights activist sits down on a Mexican worker doubling as a chair, explaining how much she loves to help suppressed people; and the Alabama priest trying to cure Brϋno from his homosexuality. However, most of the scenes live from their grotesqueness, constantly bordering on the ethically unacceptable and culminating in the homoerotic showdown between Lutz and Brϋno in a fighting cage. Which is not to say it’s any less enjoyable to see: if you enjoy (penis) in-your-face humour, you will, like me, walk out of the movie with your belly aching from laughter.

Finally, what does the Austrian in me have to say? Apart from me simply enjoying an occasional evening of crass humour, I certainly also went to be prepared for the inevitable ridicule I would have to suffer as an Austrian following Brϋno’s release. I’m not quite sure yet whether I should be relieved or disappointed, but there’s surprisingly little on the theme of my homeland, so I hope it will cause a little less upheaval in Austria than Borat did in the Kazakhstan.

BRUNO is on release in Australia, Belgium, Iceland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, the UK and USA. It opens next weekend in France and Russia and on July 31st in Brazil. It opens on August 6th in the Czech Republic; on August 14th in Turkey; on August 20th in Singapore; on September 25th in Mexico; on October 15th in Argentina and on October 23rd in Italy.

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

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

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

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

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

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET - bizarre directorial decisions weaken a visually stunning film

An odd experience on Friday night - finally getting to see one of my cinema-heroes, Tim Burton, do a Q&A at a point where I was starting to lose faith in him. I was coming to terms with the fact that SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET had left me underwhelmed. I was wondering if Burton, like Wes Anderson and Kevin Smith, was joining the league of directors delivering diminishing returns. When Tim Burton first came to our attention he was doing something radically different. He was creating fables, even if they were set in contemporary America. He was creating slushy romances set against a bitter, twisted and hateful world. And when he took teen heart-throb Johnny Depp and mutiltated his face in EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, he was radically altering our perception of the actor.

The years have passed by and we have seen Burton express his fascination with dark comedy, thwarted love and expressionistic horror films in myriad form. We've seen stop-motion animation, period horror stories and re-made children's novels. Now, with SWEENEY TODD, we get a musical. But in every case, the movies are very direct, unfiltered expressions of Burton's world. The heroines will have long blonde hair set in waves and almost white-blonde eye-brows. No matter which period the source material was set in, you are most likely going to see women in corsets and men in stocks and frock coats. Johnny Depp, the ominpresent hero, will have slightly crazy wavy hair. The photography will feature chiaroscuro lighting and an expressionistic use of colour, where it appears. Our thwarted lovers will finally be united but not after a couple of hours toiling against the world's mis-deeds. The humour will be dark - the orchestral score from Danny Elfman - rich and dominant. All these factors are distinctly Burton. I don't think he can make a movie any other way and be faithful to his interests and particular talent. But I have to say that I am becoming, well, a little bored by it.

SWEENEY TODD is a case in point. Johnny Depp looks like an older version of Ichabod Crane - the costume is the same - the only change a white stripe in his hair and rouge-noir under his eyes. Jayne Wisener, who plays Todd's grown-up daughter Johanna (badly, I mght add), is a dead ringer for Katrina Van Tassel. All the other characters and sets are dressed in an indistinct Burton-land - a sort of vague Victorian stock-horror look. The result is that the film doesn't feel new and interesting, even though the costume and production design is evidently brilliant. Another side-effect of Burton's choices is that the movie doesn't feel as though it's set in London. Sure, you see St Paul's on the sky-line now and again, but there is no respect for the topography of the area or the peculiarity of Victorian London. Fleet Street, and Mrs Lovett's pie-shop are less claustrophobic and squalid than one might imagine. All in all, the London of SWEENEY TODD looks like a more built up version of SLEEPY HOLLOW.

So the movie feels familiar. That wouldn't be so much of a problem if the framing and editing weren't also pretty weak. Too often, Burton and DP Dariusz Wolski created a beautiful tableau only to have the director/editor (Burton regular Chris Lebenzon) snap away in a jarring movement that destroys the mood. The final scene is a classic example of this. I also have problems with Burton's choices as a writer too. I'm all in favour of a slash-and-burn policy with regard to long musicals. I love that he cut out the Ballad of Sweeney Todd, which would have been an annoyingly didactic overture. But by refocusing the musical on Todd and, to a lesser extent, Mrs Lovett, Burton leaves his love story high and dry. For much of the film, I'd been bored to tears by the insipid Anthony (inspid performance too by Jamie Campbell Bower) blathering on about his Johanna, but all the same we were building toward an exciting confrontation. Johanna is hidden in a box in Todd's barber shop.

(SPOILERS till the next paragraph.) She discovers that Todd is a serial murderer and that he has just killed her guardian. She discovers that Todd is actually her father, Benjamin Baker, and that Barker was shipped off to Australia by a corrupt judge who then had his wicked way with her mother. Furthermore, she then discovers that her mother was alive until Todd just killed her! And now Todd is remorseful until he too has his throat slit. So, poor Johanna has just gone through an enormous revelation while sitting in the box in Todd's barber shop. Moreover, she has just run away to be with her Anthony. As boring as I found this character, and as annoying as I found the actress portraying her, it would have been nice to get her out of the box and give her some closure!

So much for the disappointments: what of the good? Well, despite all this grumbling, I did actually enjoy SWEENEY TODD for four simple reasons: first, Stephen Sondheim's score is brilliant and the lyrics very funny and very dark; second, Helena Bonham Carter is brilliant as the demented lover of an acknowledged murderer who bakes the corpses into pies; third, Johnny Depp is brilliant as Sweeney Todd, acting through his expressions rather than through words - his decent singing voice compensating for a dodgy British accent; fourth, Sacha Baron Cohen's scene-stealing performance as Italian barber Pirelli. (And take note, Depp fans, if you want to see a London accent done properly, the unmasked Pirelli is your benchmark.)

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET opened in the US in December 2007. It opens in South Korea on January 17th; Japan on January 19th; France, Australia, Hungary, the Netherlands, Iceland, New Zealand, Turkey, the UK and Venezuala on January 24th; Hong Kong, Lebanon and Portugal on January 31st. It opens in Denmark, Greece, Singapore, Slovakia, Brazil, Egypt, Argentina, Estonia, Finland, Spain, Germany, Swizterland, Italy, Norway, Sweden and Belgium in February. It opens in Russia on March 6th.

The Greedy Capitalist Bastard Box Office Update - BORAT REIGNS!

I don't normally take time out to comment on box office earnings, but I had to make a little victory dance on hearing the news that BORAT had topped the US box office. This is amazing when you consider that it only opened in a reduced 837 screens after the studio got worried that no-one had heard of Borat and/or that Americans might take offence. Well, it appears that our American chums LOVE Borat. The movie earned a whole $7million more than its nearest rival, the execrably banal SANTA CLAUSE 3: THE ESCAPE CLAUSE. The trouncing is even more extreme when you consider that BORAT opened on 837 screens to SANTA CLAUSE 3's 3,458 screens. That's a per screen average of $31,607 for BORAT versus a measly $5,640 for Tim Allen. What I suspect is that cineplex owners packed in the BORAT screenings - running day and night - to satisfy demand. Not only is BORAT raking in the proverbial phat cash but it's also establishing itself as a modern classic (horrible term, I know). It ranks at 116 in the IMDB Top 250 movies of all time. Looks like Borat is saved from being execute for some to come!

BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN - Jagshemash - Borat hits the ground running

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

Sacha Baron Cohen is a funny funny Jew, and he's sent up America perfectly in his latest movie: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GREAT NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN. His fictional character, Borat, a TV reporter and unintentionally homo-erotic anti-semite from Kazakhstan with his catchphrase "Jagshemesh" - is sent on a mission to the "US and A" to bring back valuable cultural learnings for the improvement of his beloved homeland. Only he's not really a reporter, he's a British comedian - and between very funny scripted scenes of Borat and his producer arguing and wrestling nude - we are treated to some of the best real-life send-up comedy ever seen.

Cohen's genius in this film is to spread his criticism and humour evenly across the spectrum of American socio-politics - from offending a group of stuck up feminists in New York by asking them if it was a problem that women had smaller brains than men - to exposing the ludicrous nature of a Pentecostal service in Texas. From coast to coast, from Republican to Democrat, from liberal to conservative - Borat reveals and satirises every prejudice and idiosyncrasy - from a Rodeo manager who wants to string up gays, to a bunch of drunken "wigger" frat-boys and their unseemly views on women.

The sheer variety of types of humour is also refreshing - it varies from Charlie Chaplin type slapstick to very politically aware satire to good old fashioned stereotyping - and throughout Cohen retains an excellent comic timing, especially noticeable in the unscripted "real-life" scenes. It also goes far further than Borat or any of Cohen's characters have ever gone before - into areas where arrest and/or lynching is a real possibility. It's also incredible to note how famous and how well connected Cohen has become when even Baywatch Babe Pamela Anderson herself - who Borat falls in love with during the movie - is in on the gag. This guy is obviously a hot hot property in Hollywood would now.

But the best characters, as usual, are the American people themselves. From the hysteria of the Pentecostal Church, to the uneasy politeness of the middle-American dinner party (Pastor and all), to the sharp unfriendliness and in-your-face attitude of New Yorkers towards Borat's approaches and kisses - the whole gamut of attitudes and personalities are included in this film. It really is a people watcher's delight. The film does well to depict America as it is - a diverse land with diverse people. It warms the heart to see the friendliness of the little Jewish household that Borat stays in and the politeness of the people who meet him - it shocks us to see the petty prejudices and casual racism of so many - and equally it chills us to see the mainstream evangelical movement as it generally is in the States: sad, insular, peer pressured, anti-scientific, and scarily well connected politically and judicially. The film has as many serious sides as comic moments.

Unfortunately, there's also a serious side to this review. Sadly, many of my American friends will be unable to watch this great film when it is released, even though it has recieved massive critical acclaim thus far, and is being well recieved on both sides of the ocean. That's because the initial release is being slashed from 2,000 to 800 cinemas in the USA - apparantly due to the fact that so few Americans have even heard of Borat, other than in the big cities, especially on the coasts. Or could it be that, this close to an election, noone wants Missouri to be influenced with the cynical connection between evangelical nuts and Congressman? Whatever the case, it is absolutely imperitive my trans-atlantic friends that you and your friends go to see this excellent movie - to encourage a wider release, better publicity and a more educated and aware populous!

If you're an American, this is as essential viewing as Bill Bryson is essential reading - it holds a mirror up to the USA in the funniest and most diverse of ways - treading a wonderful and humorous middle ground from sea to shining sea. It will only further compound the dim view held in Europe of central and mountain America as a place of cultural and social backwardness if it were, through its distaste or obliviousness, to miss such a great great movie about the very country it is part of. Seriously, such a gem shouldn't only be enjoyed in Los Angeles and New York - not only because these places have quite enough culture - but because Kansas needs some love. Borat style.

It opens on November 3rd - my advice is to pre-book your tickets, stock up on popcorn, and prepare to laugh solidly for one and half hours. Until then, Jencooie!

BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN played Toronto and London 2006. It opens in Belgium, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Slovenia, the UK, Denmark, Estonia, Finalnd, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden and the USA on the weekend of November 3rd. BORAT opens in Singapore, France, Norway, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, Russia and Portugal later in November. It opens in Argentina and Brazil in February 2007.

Bina007 adds: More on the slashed screenings: screenings in the US have been slashed because the studio is worried that Middle America will not be able to deal with a Brit taking the piss out of it. You can see why they are worried from the messages on IMDB. One poster named William G Boykin cries out: "We saved Europe from Hitler, and we are repaid with mockery!!" Mr Boykin also is very pleased with his little wordplay in coming up with the following: "A lie-beral elitist who graduated from Cambridge like Sacha Cohen is not qualified to judge me or any of my friends and family members." I only hope Boykin does not speak for the average American. A culture that cannot laugh at itself or take humourous criticism, whether from an insider or outsider sounds more like the Soviet Union than the America we (used to?)know and love.

TALLADEGA NIGHTS: THE BALLAD OF RICKY BOBBY - meh

TALLADEGA NIGHTS: THE BALLAD OF RICKY BOBBY is another one of those wacky seventies-feel comedies from the makers of ANCHORMAN: THE LEGEND OF RON BURGUNDY. Once again, it stars the fantastically talented Will Ferrell as a decent but somewhat vain over-achiever who has a bit of a life-crisis but then crawls back up to the top a better man. This time, he plays a NASCAR racer called Ricky Bobby. He comes complete with a Southern accent, a blonde bimbo wife, two hideous children, a loser dad, a cool-ass sidekick and an evil enemy.

The weird thing about TALLADEGA NIGHTS is that while its script is always on target and you can sort of understand why the lines should be funny, somehow you don't laugh that much. Perhaps it's because all of Ferrell's comedy turns seem like weaker echoes of absolutely hysterical scenes in similar movies. It IS funny when he crashes his car and runs around in his underwear and a helmet thinking he's on fire when he's not. But not AS funny as the scene when he leads a nude conga line of one in OLD SCHOOL. Which brings us to the other weird fact which is that the few bits of TALLADEGA NIGHTS that are laugh-out loud funny are almost exclusively related to John C Reilly's performance as the side-kick, Cal. As far as I am concerned, Reilly is a comic revelation, and any time he is not on screen (most of the middle section of the film) the film becomes boring.

So, there is some stuff that is funny but in a sporadic, weak way. And then there is the stuff that is plain boring - like the whole redemptive section half way into the movie where Ricky Bobby bonds with his errant father and mother and falls for a sweet girl. All are played by fine actors, not least Amy Adams as the chick, but the parts and script are simply under-cooked.

Finally, we have the stuff that is actually painful to watch. Mostly this is to do with Ricky Bobby's corporate sponsors. The husband is played by Greg Germann who was brilliantly acerbic in the godawful ALLY McBEAL, but again has not been helped by a weak script. The wife is played by Molly Shannon. She hams it up as a sexually frustrated, alcoholic drunk, no doubt on the director's instruction. It's horrible to watch. But not quite as awful as Sasha Baron Cohen's portrayal of the gay, French racer who is Ricky Bobby's nemesis. The accent is disastrously unfunny, and proves that not just any idiot can roll up and do a Peter Sellars.

Overall, though, TALLADEGA NIGHTS is not actively bad. It's just not all that good either. In the move from wigged-out cameo appearances to leading man, Will Ferrell's broad comedy has lost some of its freshness and the wackiness has been blanded out for mass market consumption. Sad to say, but I laughed more at Al Gore's jokes in AN INCOVENIENT TRUTH. A frightening thought indeed. My suggestion is that you just rent TALLADEGA on DVD and watch the gag reel that comes with end credits. In those three minutes you get more laughs that in the rest of the movie combined.

TALLADEGA NIGHTS is on release in the US, UK, Spain, Italy, Estonia, Kuwait and Hungary. It opens in Australia, Portugal, New Zealand, Iceland and Sweden in September. It opens in Argentina, Germany, Slovenia and France in October. It opens in Brazil, Israel, Slovakia, Ecuador, Colombia, Turkey and Belgium. Finally, it rolls into Egypt and the Netherlands on December 7th.