BLACK SNAKE MOAN - crazy beautiful

Yup, you saw right. Half-naked white chick chained up by a hard-ass black man. Writer-director, Craig Brewer is winking at us. He's pouring gasoline on the outrage that's smoking out the Message Boards and the Blogosphere. He's daring the judgmetal and hasty to find this flick racist and exploitative. Heck, he's enjoying it!

Because, as I see it, Craig Brewer's pulled a fast one. BLACK SNAKE MOAN's no more a serious treatise on race-relations than it is a GRINDHOUSE-style exploitation flick. Ricci and Jackson may be running around in white underpants and a wife-beater but this is actually a desperately sweet movie about unexpected friendship and redemption through the awesome medium of blues music. Redemption? Well, maybe acceptance. Jackson's character can't cure Ricci of her nymphomania - but he does prompt her to confront her demons and make a savagely honest declaration of love to her similarly afflicted boyfriend, played by Justin Timberlake. As emotional journeys go, Christina Ricci gives the performance of her career, and perhaps of the year.

This tricksy double-play - provocative exterior - humble feel-good interior - is the same mix we saw in Brewer's last film, HUSTLE AND FLOW. On the face of it, the central character in HUSTLE AND FLOW is absolutely abnoxious! A murdering, drug-dealing pimp whines about how HE has it hard! But underneath it all, the movie is a gorgeous-sweet story of a guy taking a shot at redemption through the medium of rap music. Except he doesn't quite get redeemed. Brewer's movies aren't Disney. The endings aren't that neat. People don't escape their fundamental natures. But they do end up channelling them better, and with hope of a sort.

BLACK SNAKE MOAN was released in the US in March. It opens in the UK on May 18th, in Belgium, France, Netherlands, Spain and Sweden on the weekend of the 30th May. It opens in Singapore on June 7th, Denmark on June 15th, Norway on June 22nd and in Australia on July 26th 2007.

THE PAINTED VEIL - as beautiful and vapid as Kitty before cholera

THE PAINTED VEIL is a handsomely produced adapatation of W Somerset Maugham's novel of the same name. Naomi Watts plays a spoiled English girl who marries a serious bacteriologist (Ed Norton) in a fit of pique and ends up in 1920s China having an affair with Liev Schrieber's charming vice-consul. In revenge, her husband drags her to a cholera-infested town in the interior; murder by another means. She goes, jilted by her lover, and learns her husband's true worth as she enters into his work at the local convent cum infirmary.

The production design and cinematography (Stuart Dryburgh) are absolutely top class. The acting itself is first class too although Norton and Watts are unconvincing in their English accents and Diana Rigg flits in and out of her accent as the French Mother Superior. I also found the orchestral score over-worked - all that echoing Satie! - but fans of soupy melodramas and Merchant-Ivory productions should be happy.

SPOLIERS FOLLOW. But for those who have read Somerset Maugham's novel, this adaptation will leave you feeling a little cheated. Because the novel is very firmly about Kitty Fane's journey from spoiled party girl to grown-up self-aware woman. Indeed, in the novel, Walter Fane is given very little time at all. He exists merely as an inscrutable engine of the plot, whose actions prompt Kitty into self-realisation. There is no soupy death-bed reconciliation - only the bitter realisation that he was delirious as she begged for forgiveness. We see her final humiliation at the hands of her ex-lover's wife and her declaration that she will raise her daughter to be a strong, independent woman - equal to any man. It is stirring stuff, and as much as BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, a novel about the operation of grace on a pretty, harmless, adulterous flapper, raised for nothing better than to marry well.

By contrast, this adaptation is at once more modern and more reactionary. It is modern because the film-makers feel the need to bring our post-colonial liberal angst to bear. The motives of the British, the Catholic missionaries, the Nationalists and the local warlords are all brought into question. The nuns can't just be good people doing good work. They buy babies from the poor and forcibly baptise them: the Mother Superior is in a crisis of faith. But the film is also more reactionary than the novel. We must have a romantic reconciliation between our leading couple. Walter's role must be beefed up to warrant Norton's interest - so there is a lot of time-wasting with local warlords and water-pipes. The death-bed reconciliation is a neat ending and while Kitty does meet her ex-lover in the epilogue, she is gracious and healed rather than angry and raw. Notably, her child is a boy called Walter. There are no dreams of female emancipation.

Poor show.

THE PAINTED VEIL was released in the US in December 2006 and in China, Singapore, Iran, Canada, Russia, Turkey, Lebanon, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Greece, Latvia, Hong Kong and Mexico earlier this year. It is currently playing in the UK and opens in Italy and Iceland in May. It is released on Region 1 DVD in May 2007.

NEXT - Deja Vu

Like the film-makers who came up with the super-weak title, let's not waste too much time on this piss-poor sci-fi/action flick. Nic Cage is a bad Vegas lounge-act with a worse hair-piece. He can see two minutes into his future enabling him to snag Jessica Biel as a girlfriend. His ability also attracts the attentions of Julianne Moore's FBI agent. She wants to use him to track down nasty but ethnically diverse terrorists who've got a nuke in LA. She has the audacity to do this by forcing open his eyelids CLOCKWORK-ORANGE stylee and making him watch CNN. He just wants to rescue his chick.

It's all very predictable, poorly acted and replete with cheap-looking action sequences. It's also very derivative, although curiously nothing like the Philip K Dick novel on which it's apparently based. Presumably Dick's name was used, much like the Peter Falk cameo, as a shameless hook to draw in the crowds.

Grim.

NEXT is on release in Belgium, France, Netherlands, Slovenia, Denmark, Finland, Israel, Norway, Turkey, the UK and the US. It opens in Sweden, Singapore and Estonia in May; in Egypt and Mexico in August; and in Australia and Iceland in September 2007.

TA RA RUM PUM - a movie as vacuous as its title

TA RA RUM PUM is an absurd title for this slick, polished Bollywood movie that is as vacuous as the MTV videos it emulates. Saif Ali Khan descends from OMKARA and BEING CYRUS to reprise his role as Bollywood romantic hero opposite Rani Mukherji. The first hour of the film sees Saif's character - a racing driver - woo and win Rani's music student against her rich father's wishes. Flash forward and they are a happily married couple with two jarringly cute kids. He's the best racer in the US until an accident puts him out of commission for a year and the debt collectors move in. Will the perfect family triumph over poverty? Will he over-come his traumatic memories and beat his comedically named teutonic rival, Rusty Finkelstein? Given the genre, there's no doubt!

As one would expect from a Yash Raj production, TA RA RUM PUM cannot be faulted on its production quality. Director Siddharth Anand (SALAAM NAMASTE) and DP Binod Pradhan (DEVDAS) handle the racing scenes well. For superficial, slick entertainment, Bollywood almost trumps Hollywood now. But it lacks the obvious hit songs of, say, BUNTY AUR BABLI; the humour of MUNNABHAI; or the touch of reality that graced HUM TUM. Definitely one to avoid.

TA RA RUM PUM is on release in the US, UK and India.

AWAY FROM HER - watching a heart break

AWAY FROM HER is that rare thing - a love story featuring a retired couple - played by Julie Christie and Gordon Pinset. After the first flush of love and middle-aged marital infidelity they have settled into a profound emotional and physical relationship. This is snatched away from them when the wife is diagnosed with Alzheimers disease, enters a residential care facility and in forgetting her husband, falls for another man. Julie Christie gives a brave and touching performance as a women struggling to separate her current life from snatched memories that disturb her. But it is Gordon Pinset who quietly reveals a breaking heart as he watches his wife attach herself to another.

AWAY FROM HER is a beautifully written and acted film, based on a short story by Alice Munro and directed by debutante Canadian, Sarah Polley. I loved the graceful moving camera that slowly weaves its way through a cafe of sufferers and families, or moves through a house. It is a patient interrogator of emotions that are selflessly held back as the couple try to handle this tragedy with a touch of grace. However, the disadvantage of such a deliberately patient shooting style is that the film can seem a little dragging in parts. I also found the frequent inter-cutting between the past, the wife's admission to the care facility and the husband's subsequent friendship with his rival's wife (Olympia Dukakis) un-necessarily complicated. Nonetheless, AWAY FROM HER is an important film, and an acting master-class.

AWAY FROM HER played Toronto 2006 and Sundance, Berlin and Dublin 2007. It opens in the UK this Friday, in France on May 2nd, in Norway and the US on May 4th, in the Netherlands on October 4th and in Spain in November.

THIS IS ENGLAND - powerful British tragi-comedy

THIS IS ENGLAND is a meticulously put-together tragicomedy from British writer-director, Shane Meadows. It's set in England during the early 1980s and the opening credits sequence is a montage of everything good and grim about that era: Roland Rat, Rubik's Cube, the Falklands War, the Miners' Strike and the Brixton Riots. It was a time of great economic upheaval and social unrest, but also of fantastic new movements in music and fashion. The movie channels all this contradictory nostalgia and repulsion into a single story set in a Midlands town among a gang of skin-heads. At first, Meadows implicitly argues that the movement as a whole and this gang in particular were a bunch of well-meaning kids who liked to dress a certain way and listen to a certain kind of music. But despite the no-nonsense urban look, it was at heart a multi-racial movement for working class white and black kids. This was especially reflected in Two-Tone music, some of which makes it to the movie's sound-track. In the film, the heart of this happy alliance takes the form of Woody (Joseph Gilgun), a love-able white skin-head who takes pity on a lonely, bolshie little 12 year old called Shaun. He buys him cool clothes, stops him from getting bullied and gives him someone look up to - something he's been missing since his dad died in the Falklands. Woody's also best mates with a West Indian skin-head called Milky (Andrew Shim). The first half of THIS IS ENGLAND shows the gang hanging out, having a laugh and indulging in the odd bit of casual violence. It's absolutely hysterical, laugh-out-loud cinema; excellently written and delivered with superb comic timing by the whole cast, but especially the young Thomas Turgoose.

But much as with the movement, the gang gets hijacked by a darker, nastier strain of violent racism when an ex-con called Combo (Stephen Graham) turns up. He sees a world of mass unemployment and social under-privelege and comes to resent the immigrant population for their apparent success - with appalling results. The second half of the movie ratchets up the tension, with tour-de-force dramatic exchanges. The only weakness is that the film has about three endings. What this means is that we get some provocative use of Falklands war footage. I'm not sure whether Meadows had any clear idea what he was trying to say with the juxtaposition of the domestic drama and these images. Moreover, we get a final shot that references THE 400 BLOWS and, to my mind, is a lot less powerful than it should've been because of this distraction.

THIS IS ENGLAND played Toronto and London 2006 and Berlin and Dublin 2007. It opens in the UK on Friday, in the US on July 27th and in Australia on August 16th.