THE ISLAND is really not a bad movie!

There I've said it, and completely killed my credibility as a cineaste. I think THE ISLAND is just fine. It may not be a work of art and I probably don't need to see it again, but as a high-octane, ideas-packed popcorn movie, it is entertaining enough. I know I am in a minority here. Even the movie's stars and production team are distancing themselves from it. But there is a lot to like about THE ISLAND. First of all it has an interesting plot. The idea is that the Evil Doctor Merrick (Sean Bean, the British Hollywood baddie du jour) runs a cloning service for rich hypochondriacs. For a phat fee, he will provide them with nice healthy cloned organs to be used if ever the clients get seriously ill. What the clients don't know, is that rather than growing organs, Merrick is growing actual full-size clones - perfect replicas of the original humans. Then, when an organ is needed, he tells said clone that they have one an all-expenses luxury holiday, before harvesting the requisite part. In our film, two of the clones, played with a sense of humour by Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson, start getting suspicious and to cut a long story short, escape. In one of the most delicious scenes, Ewan-Clone confronts Real-Ewan. Real-Ewan is a smarmy bastard and the actor has a lot of fun playing such a self-absorbed schmoozer. It made me think that McGregor would make a cool Bond villian. Like I said, I had a lot of fun with this movie, and I think that's because the actors play it for the cheese that it is. In addition, the movie is directed by Michael Bay, who also directed the BAD BOYS movies, which I like, and PEARL HARBOUR which was a mess. But what his films have in common, whether good or bad, is that they have great action sequences. Michael Bay knows how to put together a good chase sequence or someone blowing some shit up. And this movie has plenty of that, especially in the second half when our two heroes get out into the free world and try to look up their human counterparts. So, ignore the bad press, and check this movie. It's perfect Friday night, after-work, cheesy blockbuster entertainment.

THE ISLAND is on global release.

HERBIE: FULLY LOADED - harmless fun

Whatever the tabloid image, I believe that Lindsay Lohan is an entertainer of great merit. I find that the common thread to all of her movies is that she is charming and engaging: you genuinely want to spend time with her. I am happy to report that her latest offering, HERBIE: FULLY LOADED, is another light, heart-warming, mildly amusing family movie, fully in the tradition of those cheesy old Herbie movies that I used to love as a kid. This is not great cinema by any means but it ticks all the genre-specific boxes. The plot is simple enough. Lohan plays a young girl called Maggie Peyton who desperately wants to be a racing driver, much to the gentle disapproval of her father (Michael Keaton) and her less talented brother. However, her father does buy her a beat up old VW Beetle, a.k.a Herbie. Maggie restores Herbie with the help of the obligatory love-interest Kevin (Justin Long, who also played the “hero” in the awful gross-out comedy WAITING…). Herbie is soon running around town causing a commotion. In particular, thanks to Herbie, Lohan finds herself competing against the obnoxious racing champ, Trip Murphy, played by a beautifully cast Matt Dillon in full-on sleaze-mode. The plot then unfolds in a completely predictable manner and without the post-modern ironic overtones that many parents have come to expect when they take their kids to a flick. Nonetheless, as basic old-skool family movies go, I can’t fault this production: you could definitely do worse.

HERBIE: FULLY LOADED is on global release.

STEALTH - will Josh Lucas ever make a good film?

I have nothing against Josh Lucas. I am sure he is a perfectly fine actor. But dear lord, he has a penchant for picking hackneyed, derivative, vapid scripts. STEALTH is, sad to say, no exception. It exploits every cliche seen in every buddy-army film and adds in a dollop of sci-fi plotting that fans of 2001: A Space Odyssey will be familiar. The idea is that Josh Lucas, Jamie Foxx and, I kid you not, Jessica Biel are super-elite Navy pilots testing an ultra-cool new artificial intelligence fighter plane. Now, I have nothing against Jessica Biel, and I am sure that there are very good looking women who are elite pilots in the world, but she seriously does NOT have the gravitas to pull this role. Neither does Josh Lucas for that matter. He comes across as a sort of Tom-Cruise-lite. And as for Jamie Foxx, after RAY and COLLATERAL, this movie is a definite step back. Well, this being an attempt at a Hollywood blockbuster, Jessica Biel and Josh Lucas get it together and the AI plane develops a rogue personality. The movie then cleans up this plot mess in all too predictable fashion. To summarise, I have no elitist objections to popcorn entertainment of a sci-fi bent, but I do ask for a little more credibility and quality than is on offer here. More to the point, from the man who directed one of the most simultaneously ridiculous and brilliant action movies of recent years - XXX - I expected more.

STEALTH is on release in the US and UK. It opens in France on August 24th 2005, Germany on September 15th and Austria on September 16th.

CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY – bizarre directorial choices undercut the superb production design

I usually love movies by Tim Burton. He has an originality of vision that is rare in Hollywood and I adore the way he mixes mythic fairytales with the darker, nastier aspects of life. These two characteristics of his directorial skill would seem perfectly matched to the novels of Roald Dahl. I am a great fan of Dahl’s work precisely because he does not sugar-coat the nastiness of life as a kid. A brilliant example is in his novel, The Witches. The hero –a small boy – is turned into a mouse by an evil witch. By the end of the novel, the witches have been vanquished, but the boy is still a mouse. He has not been turned back into a kid in a classic Hollywood-ending. Indeed, he seems rather pleased that, as a mouse, his life expectancy is about the same as for his beloved old grandmother. Dark thoughts indeed for a children’s book. But, as I said, brilliantly suited to a director who made a kid’s animated movie called THE CORPSE BRIDE.

Sure enough, Burton brings a lot to this new interpretation of Dahls’ book. The production is lush and looks expensive, in sharp contrast to the 1971 version starring Gene Wilder. The set and costume design in beautifully realised and the cast is terrific. Freddie Highmore, the little kid from Finding Neverland, is charming as earnest little Charlie Bucket – the poor kid who dreams of a finding one of the five Golden Tickets that will win him entry to Willy Wonka’s famous chocolate factory. And the actors and actresses playing Charlie’s parents and grandparents are all great. It was also inspired to cast Deep Roy as all the oompa-loompas, morphing him in a variety of costumes in the various song and dance numbers, which are all fantastic fun. Compared to the original movie, the oompa loompas now seem to have real personality rather than being ciphers for the narrative-enhancing clever poems.

But there are big problems with this adaptation. First off, I think that at just under two hours the movie is a long play, especially if you are taking a young kid to see the movie. Admittedly, this movie is not much longer than the 1971 version, but I feel that the original was much more likely to hold a child’s attention because the entire second act takes place in the factory. In the new version, while kids will probably be entranced by the singing and dancing inside the factory, when the movie takes a tangent into the back story of Willy Wonka, they are likely to get fidgety. Heck, even I got fidgety. I am just not convinced that we need a back story for Willy Wonka: it just seems like an excuse for Tim Burton to re-tread thematic material he has already covered many times – the relationship between fathers and sons – notably in the cinematic mis-fire BIG FISH.

The second problem is that, in a variety of small ways, Tim Burton has made a rather more malicious film than the original adaptation. A case in point is the contrast between the original and new Veruca Salt. In the original movie, Veruca is a spoilt child, but her father is fully aware of this. A number of times, he looks nervously at Willy and shrugs as if to say, “I know it’s my fault, but now she is out of control and I don’t know what to do!” By contrast, in the new version, Mr Salt is as snobbish and obnoxious as his daughter and equally deserves her fate. Burton has made every parent more reckless and less sympathetic. To my mind these caricatures diminish the original material. Surely the novel is, if anything, a salutary warning to normal parents of the risks of over-indulging your kids. You are meant to look at these on-screen parents and say, “Jeez, that could be me!” rather than “What a bunch of freaks!”

I also found Johnny Depp’s interpretation of the Willy Wonka character bizarre and befuddling. The accent fluctuates as does the persona. Is he a geeky over-grown kid or an adult? The costume and make-up is more than eccentric and showman-like – it is just unsettling. Moreover, time and again we get the feeling that Depp’s Wonka really doesn’t like children at all. By contrast, in the book and the original film, Willy Wonka is just a normal guy, albeit a fairly eccentric one who lives alone in a chocolate factory populated by oompa loompas. He likes children, but not spoiled ones, and despairs of finding an heir. I love the fact that with Gene Wilder’s portrayal he is always an “in control” adult. The costume and song are all for show. Fundamentally he is a canny guy. The key to this is that when he comes out to greet the kids, he is hobbling with a walking stick. Then suddenly he turns a somersault and jumps up, fit as a fiddle. From that moment on, we don’t really know whether to trust him. He isn’t just some dappy, doo-lally, big kid. I respected the Gene Wilder Willy Wonka. I wouldn’t leave the Johnny Depp Willy Wonka alone with my kids. And surely, for a kids’ film, that is a pretty fatal flaw.

CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY is on global release.

KUNG FU HUSTLE - the greatest film ever made

KUNG FU is a movie unlike any I have seen before or since. It combines the lunatic physical comedy of a Buster Keaton film and a Bugs Bunny cartoon with the wi-fu artistry of the best Hong Kong action flicks and a post-modern irony born of two parts Monty Python and one part Tarantino. It is one of the few films where I laughed throughout and wept with tears of joy, not just the first time I watched it but on repeated viewings. The audacity of the movie - the commitment to see through the insane vision to its illogical end - is dazzling.

The plot is simple and unoriginal. 1920s Shanghai is populated by the murderous axe-gang - a bunch of hard-ass criminals who wear slick suits, spats and bow-ties and, naturally, get all the respect and all the girls. Two dumb-asses, one of whom is Hong Kong movie giant, Stephen Chow, want to become members of the gang in the back-water called Pigsty Alley. They even go so far as to imitate gang-members but are soon exposed due to their complete ineptitude. Unlucky for them, the landlord and landlady of Pigsty Alley are retired kung fu masters. And when the Axe gang come to defend the two idiots who have set of alarm signals, these retired masters must go to war. Along the way, the Stephen Chow character has his chi unblocked and discovers that he is a Kung Fu master. Moreover, with the help of cheap pamphlet that he has been scammed for, he learns the amazing Buddhist Palm Kung Fu. This helps him face off to the feared evil master, The Beast.

The genius of the film is to take the classic kung fu plot and take it further and faster than anyone dreamed possible. The action is bigger, louder, and often cartoon-like. And every scene has an allusion to some other pop-culture classic - from TOP HAT to THE BLUES BROTHERS to THE SHINING. Best of all, the stock characters become outrageous comic caricatures of almost grotesque proportions. We are given a rogue's gallery of characters that Charles Dickens would have been proud of. Who will forget the mad Landlady shouting on the verandah, curlers in her hair and cigarette permanently hanging from her lips? Who will forget the old kung fu master, The Beast, flip-flop hanging from his toe, straggly hair scraped across his scalp. Who will forget the little girl who has lost her lollipop?

For all these memories and so much more, KUNG FU remains the best film I have seen, and perhaps, the greatest movie ever made.

KUNG FU HUSTLE showed at Toronto 2004 and Sundance 2005. It has been on release in Europe and hits the UK this week.

Overlooked DVD of the month - BLIND SPOT: HITLER'S SECRETARY

This month's overlooked DVD is a companion piece or rather source material for the brilliant German film, DER UNTERGANG/DOWNFALL. It is not a good film in terms of cinematic technique. But it is an absolutely gripping movie in terms of its subject matter. For this is simply an extended interview with an old German woman called Traudl Junge. As a young woman sh was chosen by Hitler to be one of his personal secretaries. As she tells it, she was not a fanatic Nazi but rather an unthinking young girl blinded by the glamour of the Fuhrer; her ego flattered by his choice. All at once she was privy to the intimate details of Hitler's life both at Berchtesgaden and finally in the Berlin bunker. If she never saw high-level military meetings she does add texture to our accounts of his existence - providing crucial historic source material. In addition, Traudl can perhaps help us understand how a nation marched toward its own defeat behind such an evil man. So many years later, it is compelling to see this old woman come to terms with her guilt. At the end of the documentary she makes a chilling statement: for a long time she had comforted herself with the notion that she was just a young girl and how could she have known what was happening on the wider scale? But then, one day when she walking in Munich she came across a memorial for a young girl who was killed for resisting Nazism. That girl was the same age as Traudl when she went to work for Hitler. So it MUST have been possible to know. This sums up for me the tragedy of Germany at the levels below that of the planners and instigators - a moral abstention.

BLIND SPOT: HITLER'S SECTRETARY/IM TOTEN WINKEL: HITLERS SEKRETAERIN premiered at Berlin 2002. It is now available on DVD.