MAGIC MIKE XXL

MAGIC MIKE XXL is a shameless cash-in: a movie ordained inevitable by the popularity of the original rather than by any narrative necessity.  Three years after Magic Mike quits stripping to set up house with The Kid's sister, his old stripper friends give him a prank call and invite him to a stripper convention for a kind of all-or-nothing retirement stripathon.  It's all a little shaky and fuzzy as motives go. To be sure, Mike's post-stripping life hasn't been a success: his business is struggling and his girl has left him.  But to go by the depiction of stripping shown in this film, why on earth would he ever have left? MAGIC MIKE XXL depicts a utopian world where strippers are ARTISTS and where by catering to women's whims they empower these "queens" and bring them a kind of sexual healing.  Accordingly, when Mike meets Zoe - an ex-stripper, maybe addict, down on her luck - he knows deep in his heart and groin that all she really needs is a cutting edge lap dance to bring her mojo back.  Better living through thongs. And so the movie unfolds as a kind of hippie dippie drug- and sex-fuelled road-trip to the convention where the kindness of strangers gets our motley crew of strippers through the night. I must admit that Gregory Jacobs and Channing Tatum's script and the men's acting does deliver an authentic feeling of male camaraderie.  But Jada Pinkett Smith is no match for the absent Matthew McConaughey as the MC, and there's no real depth to anything in the film - nothing to keep us going. And as for the routines and Troy from Community's rapping topless, awkward rather than sexy, I would say. Worst of all is the A-team style training montage where the boys put their new routines, costumes and sets together for the competition finale.  Let's hope this is the end of this particular franchise.

MAGIC MIKE XXL has a running time of 115 minutes and is rated R.  The movie is global release.

SIDE EFFECTS

SIDE EFFECTS reads as one half New York Review of Books essay on the insidious pharmaceuticals industry and one half John Grisham knock-off.  Both halves sit uneasily alongside each other, and while well-enough done, never quite cohere. Moreover, they aren't satisfying in the conventional sense.

To my mind, the first half of the film is by far the strongest. The NYRB lecture on the complicity of Wall Street, psychiatrists and Big Pharma is elegant and concise. What's unnverving for a British audience, where medications is, if perhaps less common, certainly less overt, is how little surprise everyone evinces when the protagonist, Emily (Rooney Mara) tries to commit suicide.  As she returns to work and socialising with her ex-convict financier husband (Channing Tatum), everyone she comes into contact with has their own use of anti-depressants to relate. There is no sense of enquiry. It's taken for granted that everyone has periods where they need medication - whether for depression or just a sharpener before a job interview.  Of course, the first half of the film isn't really a film in a conventional sense. There's no sense of drama  - no tension.  Emily's family and friends are so understanding that it turns into a pharma-procedural - we are literally just being educated on what it is to be within modern psychiatry. 

The second half of the film is far less satisfying. It plays as a kind of sub John Grisham thriller in which a wronged man is reduced to nothing and then, with nothing but self-belief and his own intelligence, double-crosses all those who did him wrong.  Jude Law, as Emily's pyschiatrist Dr Banks,  is thus the avatar of Michael Douglas, using and abusing his ability to institutionalise and medicate his opponent. This part of the film works as a finely tuned clockwork toy.  You know precisely what the outcome is - it follows its genre conventions precisely.  There's no tension - no surprise.  I found myself marvelling at the interior design of Jude Law's apartment and the shockingly trashy ombre hair colour on Rooney Mara's hair extensions. 

So here's the deal, you can watch SIDE EFFECTS and have an okay time learning about stuff you already know and watching a thriller where every plot twist is expected. The performances are good enough, and the soundtrack by Thomas Newman is particularly good.  But let's not kid ourselves that this is a work of art.

SIDE EFFECTS has a running time of 106 minutes and is rated R in the USA.

SIDE EFFECTS was released earlier this year in the USA, Canada, Romania, Australia, Russia, the Ukraine and Lithuania. It is currently on release in Greece, Portugal, Ireland and the UK. It opens next weekend in the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Kuwait and the Netherlands; on March 21st in Argentina, Singapore and Mexico; on March 28th in Chile, Estonia and Latvia; on April 3rd in France; on April 10th in Belgium; on April 19th in Poland and Sweden; on April 25th in Germany; on May 2nd in Denmark; on May 9th in New Zealand and on May 31st in Brazil.

MAGIC MIKE

MAGIC MIKE is a much hyped film about a male stripper who wants to escape the business, all the while inducting a young kid into the same exploitative game. Based loosely on male lead Channing Tatum's own experiences, the movie has an authentic eye for the details of the business, but also a blind eye for the seedier aspects of the game.  We see Mike's young protege fall into drug use and strip club owner Dallas (Matthew McConaughey) exploit both Mike and The Kid. But the griminess of the business, the gay subculture, the violence of the drug trade aren't shown.  Rather we get a warm-yellow-toned world of buff guys banging hot chicks, living in cool lofts, with a nice redemptive character arc. This truly is Disney does Strip Clubs just as Strip Clubs give men and women a safe fantasy environment. 

Where the movie works best is in showcasing Channing Tatum's easy charm as the jovial "elder brother" figure to The Kid and the suitor to the kid's sister. Even when he disses the bank for refusing him a loan, he gets the best lines.  Steven Soderbergh is also at his best in directing, editing and photographing these causal scenes of intimacy, taking us back to his indie roots.  Matthew McConaughey gets the "Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder" role - the outlandish, cartoonish svengali who is utterly at peace with his world, and the movie creates minor tension by leaving it till the end to show him stripping.  As for Alex Pettyfer as The Kid, it's a pretty anonymous performance. 

But taken as a whole, I found the movie rather wearying.  There were too many stripping routines, The Kid's descent and Mike's redemption were too obviously mapped out. The whole thing tdo sleek and easy and long.  I couldn't help but think that there was a cracking 95 minute movie inside this flick's 120 minute running time. 

MAGIC MIKE is currently on release in Georgia, Russia, Canada, Estonia, Lithuania, the USA, Thailand, the Philippines, the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal, Iceland and Poland.  It opens on July 20th in Norway; July 26th in Australia and New Zealand; August 3rd in Greece, Israel and Romania; August 9th in Hungary and Singapore; August 15th in Belgium, France, Sweden and Germany; August 23rd in Denmark; Finland on September 7th; Italy on September 21st; Hong Kong on September 27th; Spain and Turkey on October 5th; Brazil on November 2nd; Taiwan on November 9th; Mexico on November 23rd and in Argentina on January 3rd 2013.

Guest review by George Ghon - CONTAGION

A ghastly virus breaks out. It kills so fast that any hope to find a suitable remedy in time becomes elusive. A father, whose wife had died, tries to protect his daughter from the evil disease (Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Anna Jacoby-Heron respectively). The government official (Laurence Fishburne) with field experience shows his toughness and rigor to handle the nightmarish situation according to his professional standards. He cooperates with the World Health Organization, which in turn sends a cute epidemy specialist (Marion Cotillard) to analyse the trajectory of the virus and determine where it had come from, ending up on site in Hong Kong. The scientist in the laboratory (Jennifer Ehle) does what she can and all along the viewer waits for an unexpected turn in the plot. 

Is a James Bond villain behind all this? Does the CIA have secret intelligence? Can it be that a Swiss pharmaceuticals CEO has gone insane under the current economic pressure and a little experiment to boost the sales for Aspirin went way out of control? 

No, nothing, the story just continues and the source of the disease is backtracked to an obscure bat population in the Asian jungle. The whole trick box of elaborate Hollywood dramaturgy remains closed, giving preference to a Realistic account of a current-day bio-catastrophe. There is no evil scheme to be discovered. The guys in power are working hard, doing their job as best as they can. The alternative souls (Jude Law as Frisco-based wannabe journalist) are as corrupt and prone to sell their conscience to greedy hedge fund managers as every other human being could possibly be. And even the offices of high profile government organisations, and with them their functionaries, are suspiciously unattractive.

Steven Soderbergh, who wants to see this? Hollywood is the dream factory, not the documentary Mecca! It is easy to dismiss this film as unsuccessful try to wrap an action plot into some layers of the Real. Boring! On the other hand, do we need to see another hyper-stylized, action packed, fast cut, over-dramatized doomsday film? Isn’t Steven Soderbergh here discovering an interesting gap that uses all the tools Hollywood has on display, but does not heighten them to a flasher à la Michael Bay? 

The film is purely led by the prosaic unfolding of a story, which could happen any day, without any conspiracy scheming that goes unnoticed by the public. The lead characters are not immortal (Bruce Willis, Tom Cruise, watch out for Mr. Soderbergh’s casting director, he might eventually get you), nor are they overly beautified (ok, Gwyneth Paltrow looks sexy in a party scene, but no one else would show her deliberately with reddened skin irritations on the neck, I guess) or morally beyond (the people having privileged access to the vaccine that is eventually found gladly take it, without making too much fuss about their ius primae seri). Contagion doesn’t bother too much with aesthetic conventions or viewer’s expectations. It just tells it how it is. Hollywood for the quotidian.

CONTAGION played Venice 2011 and opened in September in Hong Kong, Singapore, Italy and the US. It opened in Hungary on October 13th; and in Finland, Ireland, Poland, Sweden and the UK on October 21st; in Norway on October 28th. It opens in Belgium and France on November 9th; in Spain on November 29th; in Australia on December 3rd and in Germany on December 24th.

London Film Fest Day 13 - THE INFORMANT!

THE INFORMANT! is perhaps the most enjoyable film that Steven Soderbergh has ever made. It’s clever and accomplished but wears its high production values lightly. It’s a story as playful and charming and roguish as its protagonist, Mark Whitacre, a man that we laugh at while laughing with. Whitacre was a successful executive at a corn-products manufacturer with a somewhat Walter Mitty-ish hold on the truth. Who knows why he embezzled money? He was making a good living after all. And worse still, if you were embezzling money, would you really make up stories of corporate espionage, attracting the attention of the FBI? Even more ludicrously, would you become an FBI insider, making tapes for the FBI indicting your firm of an international price-fixing conspiracy? Whitacre did all this and more. In his own mind he was a character in a John Grisham or Michael Crichton novel, and the tongue-in-cheek 70s serial score hints at the fact that this is a man who really is living in a world inspired by popular culture. He’s a hero in his own mind, much like the other real life lost soul Josh Harris in Ondi Timoner’s documentary WE LIVE IN PUBLIC. Soderbergh’s movie is a success because it knows just what balance between mockery and empathy to sustain, and because Matt Damon is superb in making this rather bizarre and exasperating guy likeable. After all, as Soderbergh chooses to tell it, we spend the entire movie inside Whitacre’s head, listening to his banal, bizarre stream of consciousness. This device could’ve been intensely irritating and it’s credit to the script and Damon that in fact, it’s very funny and also rather touching. It reminded me a bit of his performance as Tom Ripley - an altogether more sinister character - but again, someone who has a tenuous grasp on reality. You spend the movie knowing Ripley is a psychopath but still, the tragedy of his self-created prison is touching. THE INSIDER! is not an entire success, however, The momentum and sheer fun of the first half, as we watch Whitacre live out his dream as an FBI spy, fade as we enter the second half, and the lies are exposed. I felt it could’ve been trimmed down to a neat and zippy 90 minutes. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed the film and was delighted to have finally found a Soderbergh film to admire after a string of over-inflated pretentious flicks that left me cold.

THE INFORMANT! played Venice and Toronto 2009. It opened in September in Canada, Italy, the USA, Spain and France and in October in Greece, Brazil, Sweden, New Zealand and South Africa. It opens later this month in Finland, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Denmark, Iceland and Norway. It opens on November 5th in the Czech Republic, Germany, Russia and the Ukraine. It opens on November 20th in Belgium, Slovakia, Lithuania, and the UK. It opens on November 27th in Estonia and on December 3rd in Australia.

DVD review - THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE

THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE is another one of those films that Steven Soderbergh (OCEAN'S ELEVEN, TRAFFIC) makes on a low budget to indulge his auteur-fantasy. The first was a lo-fi, hi-def, amateur-cast drama called BUBBLE. BUBBLE was about brutal jealousy among factory workers. With the deadpan amateur cast and hokey script, I was utterly unimpressed. THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE is another beast entirely. For a start, it looks much better - indeed, it's just as glossy as Soderbergh's mainstream films and the static framing works well as a distancing device that matches the emotional distance between the characters. If BUBBLE was about inappropriately extreme emotion, THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE is about lack of emotion. Real-life prostitute Sasha Grey plays a high-class hooker who sells not just sex (indeed, we never see it) but fake relationships. All this, while trying to maintain a relationship with her real-life boyfriend. This film could've been amazing. The concept of using a real-life prostitute to play an imaginary prostitute who's playing a girlfriend to the detriment of her real (qua movie) boyfriend, is fascinating. The movie also serves as a small slice of life at the height of the boom - a mirror to that craziness - where people were obsessed with investment returns and status symbols and everything could be bought. But ultimately, THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE is a failure. Casting an amateur leads to line-delivery that is painfully flat and fake. The dialogue (from the screenwriters of ROUNDERS and OCEAN'S THIRTEEN) also feels stilted and fake. As a result, at the point in the film when we're supposed to empathise with the hooker as she takes a chance on love with a client, we're so distanced from the action that it's impossible to care.

THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE played Sundance 2009 and opened in the US, Canada, France, Brazil and Australia earlier this year. It was released on Region 1 DVD yesterday. It opens in Russia on October 22nd and in the UK on November 27th.

London Film Festival Day 11 - CHE Parts 1 and 2

"I was sitting in first class with a hot towel on my face when I realised I was the right person to direct this film." Steven Soderbegh, introducing his 4 hour, 2 part biopic of revolutionary Marxist Ernesto "Che" Guevera at the London Film Festival.

"Maybe they didn't have a Q&A because they were so embarassed at how at how bad the film was?" Our Gmunden correspondent, leaving the cinema, 4 hours later.

CHE (THE ARGENTINE & GUERILLA) is an interminable, unedifying vanity project from director Steven Soderbergh, producer and lead actor Benicio del Toro and newbie writer Peter Buchman. It's a film that gives us no real insight into Che's politics or personality - indeed it perversely holds us at a distance to him. It's a film that gives us no real feel for his revolutionary career - perversely leaving Cuba before he has even entered Havana. It's a film that tells us nothing about his charisma or passion - nowhere in this film do I get a feel for why people would have put themselves in mortal danger to follow him.

Do we blame Soderbergh for having no over-arching vision for this story? Do we blame del Toro for his walking zombie performance? Do we blame the screen-writers for taking a decade of radical action and boiling it down to a series of monotonous, unexciting marches? Whatever the reason, CHE is quite frankly a disaster.

The movie is divided into two parts: THE ARGENTINE and THE GUERILLA. Producer Laura Bickman told us that they were to be released as two separate films rather than playing as a double bill, so that's how I'll review them here.

THE ARGENTINE opens with a patronising shot showing a map of Cuba, highlighting the name of each region and the position of the major cities. It's like Geography 101. It's a clumsy way to convey information and has zero artistic content. Perhaps the film-makers should realise that anyone who comits 4 hours to a Che biopic probably knows where Cuba is. We then enter into the main body of the film, which is framed by a scene in Mexico City where Fidel Castro (Demián Bichir) outlines his plan to invade Cuba, and persuades Che (del Toro) to go with him. In the final scene of the film, Che will agree, only if he can leave Cuba when the invasion is over and spread the revolutionary message to the rest of Latin America. The intervening two hours inter-cut the story of the invasion of 1956 with scenes of Che confronting the United Nations in New York in 1964.

The footage of the Cuban revolution is pretty monotonous. We see revolutionaries march through long grass a lot. Occasionally, Castro hurts Che by refusing to let him take command of troops. Che is, after all, an outsider, an intellectual, and better suited to training, inspiring, and treating illness, than strategic thinking. We also see flashes of Che's purist ethics. He wants his men to be educated, moral, above petty corruption. All these themes are fascinating, and a film pursuing them would've given real insight to Che's politics and personality. Sadly, these moments of clarity are only ever brief flashes. Other than that, we learn that war is quite boring. The footage from New York is similarly frustrating insofar as Soderbergh could've really investigated the reactions to the revolution from US politicians and other Latin American countries. After all, Che is preaching world revolution - how threatening was that to the US and Latin American establishment? But once again, we get quick-cut, impressionistic scenes that only make sense if you come into the movie with a lot of prior knowledge.

CHE: THE ARGENTINE ends with Che on the road from Santa Clara to Havana. We never see him arrive. It's an odd ending - leaving the audience with little sense of closure. The movie finishes abruptly. This may work in a double-bill, but I doubt that anyone would give GUERILLA a chance after this dull, unenlightening, strangely neutered work. I learned nothing about Che that I didn't already know, and it's interesting to note that in the US, this first film is not being released at all (acc to IMDB).

CHE: GUERILLA is modestly more successful that CHE: THE ARGENTINE, but the benchmark is low. The first thing to say is that it looks like a completely different film. The shooting style and editing style are much more languid and patient - the narrative is linear - we are allowed a little closer, though still not close enough - to our hero.

The movie skips Che's entry to Havana and his period serving in the Cuban governemnt. It skips his failed attempt to start a revolution in the Congo and rolls right into his radical activities in Bolivia in 66/67. The revolution is hopeless and the film a monotonous and depressing inch by inch movement toward the inevitable execution. The Bolivian government is aided by the US, so instead of hapless Cuban troops who surrender at the first sign of violence, Che is facing crack special ops. The Cuban peasants were ready for revolution but the Bolivian peasants are unconvinced by his arguments. (Heck, so are we - we never see him as a charismatic Marxist evangelical). Worse still, the local Communists want nothing to do with him; he loses contact with Havana; and his foreign aides stupidly lead the Bolivians right to him. So what you get is a film about isolation and failure. A random bunch of men wander round the Bolivian countryside until finally they are cornered and shot. Portraits of failure and disillusionment can be captivating. Look at the brilliant, mournful THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD. But GUERILLA is just dull. We are never allowed to empathise with Che in the way that we entered the emotional drama betwee James and Ford.

If CHE: GUERILLA is better than THE ARGENTINE it's because there are odd moments of visual flair. The scene where some of the guerilla are gunned down in a river is beautifully done. And there is a scene where Che is injured and on the run on the slope of a ridge. At the top, silhouetted against the horizon we see a handful of special ops soldier. And then, in a flash of pure menace, these men are joined by tens of other until the horizon is filled with men bearing down on our hero. These moments are to be expected from a man with Soderbergh's experience and technical skill. They are, however, too few.

Soderbergh began the LIFF screening with a joke - that a man who flies first class is the wrong man to make CHE. That's too reductive. But still, it contains a grain of truth. Walter Salles made a brilliant film about CHE because he was passionate about the content, could relate to it and had something to say about it. Salles was, like Che, born into privilege in Latin America but has chosen to turn his back on the establishment (in this case, being the scion of a banking family) in order to make politically and socially aware films about the poor. I would love to know why Soderbergh came to this project and whether, in all honesty, he felt any real emotional attachment to it. Because there is little evidence of any love for the project in the final films.

CHE / THE ARGENTINE & GUERILLA played Cannes where Benicio del Toro won Best Actor, Toronto and London 2008. THE ARGENTINE went on release in Spain in September, opens in Mexico on December 26th; opens in the UK on January 2nd; in France on January 7th and in Argentina on January 29th. GUERILLA opens in Argtnina on November 13th; in Greece on November 27th; in the US on December 12th; in France on January 28th; in the UK on February 20th and in Japan in March.

WIND CHILL - workman-like supernatural thriller

On the hottest day of the year so far, Doctor007 and I ducked into a blissfully air-conditioned but absolutely empty theatre to catch whatever was playing. That turned out to be an under-the-radar spoooooky thriller from the Clooney/Soderbergh production camp. The plot is simple. A beautiful college student cadges a ride home from a geek. They get stranded in the snow and seemingly enter an eternal loop of road accidents and other wacky shit. It's pretty formulaic but gets a marginal thumbs-up for three reasons. First, DP Dan Laustsen beautifully photographs the sinister snow-swept mountains. Second, it's nice to see a pretty heroine in a horror flick who actually has brains. Rather than a ditzy, bikini-clad blonde, WIND CHILL presents us with Emily Blunt's gutsy engineering student. And yes, she is perfectly capable of saving herself, thank you very much. Third, both Emily Blunt and Ashton Holmes (HISTORY OF VIOLENCE) give credible performances as two teens. Indeed, the blossoming of their relationship is far more interesting than the supernatural nonsense surrounding them.

WIND CHILL was released in the US in April 2007 and is currently on limited release in the UK.

SPOILER ALERT: I also think the movie could've been improved by ending 10 minutes earlier, with the chick caught in a nightmarish constant loop, rather than stumbling sentimentally after her guardian-angel love-interest to safety.....

OCEAN'S THIRTEEN are smug bastards

OCEAN'S THIRTEEN is an arrogant film. Look how smooth we are; look how well we dress; look at our private jets and our designer sunglasses; look at the luxury hotels we stay in; look at the stand-up friends we have; look how effortlessly we slice through apparently impenetratable security systems.....

In short, look how COOL we are.

We're so cool, you'll pay ten quid to watch us be cool. And we won't have to create genuine plot twists like in OCEAN'S ELEVEN. And we won't bother having a love-story at the movie's heart. Heck, with our ludicrous channel tunnel plot-line we'll break all bounds of credibility. And you won't even care because you'll be so blinded by our dazzling teeth.

The fact that the script-writers have the audacity to rail against the modern Vegas - the crass commercialisation and PG-i-sation the Strip - infuriates me with its hypocrisy. And were they trying to make some point about underpaid Mexican workers? I mean, seriously, do they really think that from THIS platform, they can hint at a social critique? I am stumped.

OCEAN'S THIRTEEN is on global release.

THE GOOD GERMAN needs a good DP

THE GOOD GERMAN is a pastiche of movies like CASABLANCA, THE THIRD MAN and CHINATOWN. Director Steven Soderbergh sets himself a sort of technical exercise: to recreate an old-fashioned noir-thriller using the technical apparatus available to film-makers at the time. To that end, the movie is shot in black-and-white using the appropriate camera equipment on a Hollywood back-lot. The resulting film is technically incompetent. Soderbergh betrays a lack of technical mastery that is unforgivable in a technical exercise of this sort: or at the very least, a lack of practical humility in refusing to hire a Director of Photography with the requisite skills. The lighting and treatment of the film stock results in a poorly lit and often under or over exposed movie which jars the viewer. To see old-fashioned cinema techniques done properly one need look no further than some of Lars von Trier's early movies, not least Zentropa. Still, the cack-handed photography is to some extent offset by the appropriate orchestral score and the spot-on production design.

Technical failure aside, how does THE GOOD GERMAN fare as a thriller? I'm split on this. On the one hand, I think the casting is a complete failure. Tobey Maguire is unconvincing - simply too light - as a young American GI on the make in post-war Berlin. He's meant to be a cunning, anti-Semitic, abusive black-marketeer pimping out his glamorous girlfriend played by Cate Blanchett. Maguire's performance is so superficial that the relationship isn't sold to the audience. As for Cate Blanchett, as much as I admire her acting chops, to be cruel, she simply doesn't have the conventional beauty required for such a role. Moreover, her decision to lower the tone of her voice to approximate a sort of Garbo-seductive tone is a mis-fire. It sounds like a mockery. Moreover, her accent is inconsistent and basically not very German. George Clooney is by far the most appropriately cast as a journalist investigating a murder at the Potsdam conference and the truth about Cate Blanchett's character. Although he betrays a rather limited range, the only definite clanger is when he speaks German with an accent and fluency ridiculously poor for a character who supposedly lived in Berlin before the war.

The plot itself is just fine. Moderately interesting and I did want to know whodunnit and whytheydunnit. In fact, I now want to read the source novel and have my enjoyment of the story unencumbered by poor photography, Cate Blanchett's accent and Soderbergh's clumsy nods to noir classics. You'll get an idea of how clumsy these are when I tell you that Clooney spends much of the film with a plaster across his ear, Nicholson stylee.

Overall, then, what can I say? Despite its manifest flaws, THE GOOD GERMAN does sort of work as a thriller. Perhaps one for DVD?

THE GOOD GERMAN played Berlin and Dublin 2007. It has already opened in the US, Argentina and France and opens in Singapore and Sweden next week. It opens in Germany, Austria and Italy on March 2nd and in Australia, Spain and the UK on March 9th. It opens in Belgium and Iceland on the 16th and in Brazil on the 23rd. It opens in India, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Turkey, Norway and Japan in April.

BUBBLE - An artistic sneeze

QUICK REVIEW: DO NOT SEE THIS FILM. LONG REVIEW: My review of this film is pretty redundant seeing as very few people will ever read it and even if they do, actually finding a theatre playing this movie is pretty hard. As far as I can tell, it only has a US release date - 26th January 2006 - and it is being released simultaneously in theatres, on cable and on DVD. Apparently this is because it is SO cool, cutting edge, "Sundance" etc., that it can shun the usual Hollywood premiere, critical attention hoopla. Translation: this is so pointless and unmarketable it is going straight to video. Feel free to dig BUBBLE out of your local Blockbuster bargain bin next Spring, but be warned - you'll never get those 70 minutes back.

To be sure, this movie is not Pure Cinematic Evil. It is NOT Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. In fact, it has a lot going for it. The movie is directed by Steven Soderbergh, the man who brought you Erin Brokovich and the all new Ocean's Eleven. He shoots the movie on Hi-Def video but it looks as good as if it were shot on celluloid. This is no mean feat. Moreover, there is something admirable in the fact that Soderbergh has felt the need and the actually been able to go low-budget after the $110 million extravaganza that was Ocean's Twelve.

He takes us to Bumblef*ck USA. Meet Martha, an obese middle-aged woman who lives with her invalided father and spraypaints plastic dolls in a small factory. The only joy in her life is eating junk food and befriending the much younger Kyle. Kyle is a young kid who didn't graduate high school and works in the factory making the plastic dolls. He lives with his mum in a trailor. Into this mix comes Rose, a young single mother who romances Kyle provoking Martha's jealousy.

Soderbergh wants us to think he is "keeping it real". There are lots of loving still shots of various bits of factory equipment, and he has cast unknown "real" people who speak in "authentic voices" (translation: boring, whiny, repetitive, assine....)

Stuff happens to Martha, Kyle and Rose for 70 minutes and then the movie sort of stops, leaving the audience thinking "huh?!"* But what is the freakin' point?! Deuce Bigalow had a point. The Wedding Crashers had a point. They wanted to make us laugh. They failed, but the aim was admirable. Shit, even Pearl Harbour had a point. BUBBLE does not have a point. Indeed, the only tentatively provocative shot is at the end-credits when we see the rejected defective plastic dolls - arrays of mutilated plastic - a comment on society's obsession with superficial perfection?

What do I know? Not much. And certainly not a jot more at the end of Bubble than at the beginning.

*Beware any critics who tell you this is similar in intent and quality as movies like Elephant and Gerry. They didn't have to pay £12.50 to see it and are going to be less pissed than you will be by a truly experimental film.

OCEAN’S TWELVE – all style, no substance

For those who didn’t see OCEAN’S ELEVEN, the movie that precedes OCEAN’S TWELVE, the set up is as follows. A bunch of thieves and con artists are gathered together by an ex-convict named Danny Ocean (George Clooney). He plans to pull of the most audacious heist of all time: robbing the vault beneath three large casinos in Vegas owned by Ocean’s nemesis, Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia). Benedict stands for the new Vegas – family entertainment, business practices more suited to an investment bank than the old skool, and ruthless efficiency. To cap it all off, he is dating Ocean’s ex-wife, Tess (Julia Roberts). By the end of OCEAN’S ELEVEN, the gang has made off Benedict’s money and his girl. It was a sweet film. Nicely done comic performances from a superb ensemble cast with genuine chemistry; beautifully slick production design; über-cool sound-track and some nice little pop-culture references. But underlying it all was a well-crafted heist-thriller with some clever and credible plot twists. In short, the flick had something for the heart and something for the head, and gave us another reason to forgive Steven Soderbergh for that horrific SOLARIS remake.

Now, OCEAN’S TWELVE is a different kettle of fish. As it opens, the gang is on the run in Europe with Benedict on their tale demanding the original money back not to mention the interest. As a result, the gang is forced to compete with the French master-criminal, The Night Fox (Vincent Cassel), to pull off three separate jobs in three separate European cities, with a gorgeous Interpol agent (Catherine Zeta Jones) shadowing their every move. So, instead of eleven criminals pulling off one heist against one enemy, we now have twelve people versus another criminal, pulling off three heists against one enemy plus one police chick as well as sundry other complications. Now, I have nothing against complex plots per se, and I had no trouble understanding what was going on. But I did feel that the movie suffered from the clutter of plot strands and characters – none of which are given time to develop and catch our interest. In the end, the movie simply collapsed into a serious of beautifully staged vignettes – good-looking people in slick clothes hanging out in nice hotels. Sort of like the cinematic equivalent of reading Condé Nast Traveller magazine. It gets worse. Around two-thirds of the way through, this movie jumps the shark with a move so self-referential and ridiculous that it undermines the credibility of the whole project. The movie doesn’t so much wink at the audience as reach out, grab your popcorn and pour it over your head. I can only hope that this ridiculous manoeuvre sinks the franchise, but I doubt it.

OCEAN’S TWELVE was released in the US and most of Europe last December, but opens in the UK today.