FELON - thoughtful prison drama, but lacking in real bite

Veteran stunt director Ric Roman Waugh has turned writer-director with FELON, a thoughtful prison drama based on a true story, that lacks momentum in the first two thirds and then dissolves into melodrama in the final third. Despite good location work in New Mexico and fine performances from Stephen Dorff and Val Kilmer, the movie never quite coheres. Dorff plays a successful businessman and husband imprisoned after killing a home intruder, and transferred to maximum security on a false accusation. A shared respect for family leads to a relationship with the older, cannier criminal played by Kilmer in a dude like goatee and replete with colourful tatoos. The crims are victimised by corrupt police, yada, yada, but it never quite captures the peril and cruelty of SHAWSHANK. And, as I said, the final third degenerates and the overall effect that is "meh". Unsurprisingly, this went straight to DVD outside of the US.

FELON was released in the US in summer 2008 and went straight to DVD everywhere else.

HARRY POTTER & THE HALF BLOOD PRINCE - bland

The sixth installment of the HARRY POTTER saga is a perfectly serviceable and enjoyable addition to the franchise. The movie wastes no time in establishing the characters and the story so far - so neither will I. After all, how can you spoil a movie when everyone's read the books? Technically, the film works fine. Steve Kloves has done a good job of condensing the material without being too slavish and Bruno Delbonnel has filmed it in the same warm, dark tones as A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT. The special effects and production design are top-notch. The performances are particularly strong - all the regulars do well, with Daniel Radcliffe given a chance to play some comedy, rather than just look put-upon. Among the new-comers, Jessie Cave plays comedy brilliantly as Ron Weasley's first girlfriend and Evanna Lynch steals every scene as Luna Lovegood.

For all that, I did have two problems with the film. Not big enough to kill my enjoyment, but flaws nonetheless. First, the movie lacks any real inventiveness or directorial stamp, in the manner of Alfonso Cuarón's AZKABAN. Second, the film is too biased in favour of the teen rom-com material in the novel at the expense of properly developing the serious material concerning Tom Riddle, Lord Voldemort, horcruxes, Snape and Malfoy. The films have been getting progressively darker and more emotionally satisfying. The last movie featured a genuinely scary scene with Ralph Fieenes. But this movie went for the easy laughs. And in doing so, the film-makers dropped the ball. Take, for example, the limited screen-time and development of Draco Malfoy. That's an emotional struggle to get your teeth into, but his final confrontation with Dumbledore is very brief. And what about the identity of the Half Blood Prince? That's revealed almost as an aside!

So, top marks for light laughs: but they dropped the ball on the darker content.

HARRY POTTER & THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE is on global release.

Preston Sturges Retrospective 1 and Pantheon movie of the month - SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS

Preston Sturges - King of the Screwball Comedy and inspiration for the Coen Brothers early work - one of the first Hollywood screen-writers to wrest control of his work and become a "full service" auteur - writer, director and producer. Starting in 1940, Sturges had an astounding 4 year run, crafting wonderful romantic-comedies that mixed good old-fashioned slapstick with bravura dialogue capturing the battle between the sexes. In just four years, he redefined the popular comedy and made serious cash to boot. Most directors would be happy to produce a single film as iconic as THE GREAT MRS McGINTY (1940), THE LADY EVE (1941), SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS (1941), THE PALM BEACH STORY (1942), THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN'S CREEK (1944), and HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO (1944). So over the next few weeks, I'll be taking some to watch these great movies, in no particular order, and to have some fun!

John L. Sullivan: I want this picture to be a commentary on modern conditions. Stark realism. The problems that confront the average man!

LeBrand: But with a little sex in it.

John L. Sullivan: A little, but I don't want to stress it. I want this picture to be a document. I want to hold a mirror up to life. I want this to be a picture of dignity! A true canvas of the suffering of humanity!

LeBrand: But with a little sex in it.

John L. Sullivan: [reluctantly] With a little sex in it.

Hadrian: How 'bout a nice musical?

SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS is a great movie, regularly appearing on critics and film-makers' Top Movies of All Time lists, but it's not as well-known as other iconic 1940s features. I watched it for the first time recently, and was surprised by the fact that, despite being known for it's comic opening, quoted above, it's really a very serious film about poverty, homelessness, and the cruelty of the justice system.

As the movie opens, a handsome, privileged, rich Hollywood director, John Sullivan plans to make a movie entitled O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? - a title borrowed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen for their 2000 film. He wants to make a serious movie about poverty, but the studio is nervous about its box-office potential. In order to put him off, they rightly criticise him for not knowing a damn about poverty. So Sullivan borrows a tramp's costume from wardrobe and decides to try and make it on ten cents a day.

The resulting film is tricky and post-modern before the term was invented. The film itself has a lot of footage of poverty and destitution. Sullivan is arrested, imprisoned and works on a chain gang. He goes to the cinema as a prisoner, looking to the funnies for his only joy in life. But the film, SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS is also concerned with being too serious and un-entertaining - the same concern that afflicted the producers of O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU? So, Sullivan has some witty dialogue with the producers, itself about serious versus entertaining films! Moreover, there has to be a screwball romance: and so Sullivan takes up with a beautiful aspiring actress (Veronica Lake) and there's a lot of cute dialogue, some physical comedy involving falling into a swimming pool, and a happy ending.

The movie ends with Hollywood having it's cake and eating it. It's okay to make superficial funny pictures because, hey, "that's all some people have". And, if we make a bunch of money along the way, well....

I can't quite decide if I admire or abhor SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS for this slippery conclusion. But I do admire it for it's clever dialogue, physical comedy, realistic depiction of poverty and clever structure. It's a classic film, and one that's worth viewing, especially if you're a Coen Brothers fan.

SULLIVAN'S TRAVEL was released in 1941.

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.

FIRED UP - piss-poor teen "comedy"

From the Director of the piss-poor DUMB AND DUMBERER and an untested writer comes a lame-ass teen comedy, whose limited ambitions can be summed up by the fact that the film-makers think the abbreviation of its title is funny. Nicholas d'Agosto and Eric Christian Olsen (no you won't have heard of them) play two jocks who decide to become cheerleaders in order to get laid. Because evidently girls are attracted to guys who cheer rather than guys who play ball. But it's okay, because after an hour of weak gags about getting laid, what the chaps discover is that all they really want is to be part of a team.

The premise of the movie is paper-thin and implausible. Still, teen rom-coms - a highly stylised genre - have survived worse. What really does for this movie is the under-powered script (compare how the MILF storyline is handled here to AMERICAN PIE), not to mention the fact that the actors are at least ten years too old for the parts. What the director and screen-writer have forgotten is that the best lewd and crude teen comedies satisfy on two levels - they really go for the gross-out comedy but they also have an emotional pull. In AMERICAN PIE we laughed at the jokes but we also sympathised with the geeks. FIRED UP neither pushes the jokes far enough nor creates any emotional depth.

FIRED UP was released in the US, Australia and Kazakhstan earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK. It opens in South Africa on August 7th.

PUBLIC ENEMIES - is that it?

Man, this movie was boring. I mean, eye-rollingly, "should I walk out?", "what should I make for dinner?" boring. And all this, despite the fact that I really like Johnny Depp and Christian Bale as actors, I really like gangster movies, and I respect Michael Mann as a director. Maybe it's the script? Maybe it's the cheap-looking, distractingly hand-held DV shooting-style? Maybe it's the fact that Michael Mann just isn't that interested in who John Dillinger really was? But this biopic of one of America's most notorious bank robbers lacks energy and drive. It just never got me by the proverbial balls and made me care.

What a shame. What better time to make a film about a folk hero who robbed the banks that were foreclosing on honest, hard-working folk at the height of the Great Depression? What better time to show the FBI abusing civil rights in its mad dash to imprison Public Enemy Number One? But Michael Mann isn't really interested in all that.

He's interested in telling the same old Michael Mann story - where real men are defined by their job and real movies are about real men who cannot, for some reason, continue in that job, and enter an existential crisis. So here's John Dillinger as the man who robs banks, never leaves a pal behind bars, and offers his coat to ladies. He isn't closed down by the Feds but, more fundamentally, by the crime syndicates who realise that bank robbery is bad for the real business of gaming rackets. Impeded from his typical modus operandi, Dillinger is forced to take work with the psychopath Babyface Nelson - a much higher stakes game.

Don't get me wrong - DV aside - this isn't a bad film. Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Billy Crudup, Marion Cotillard all give decent performances. Stephen Graham as Babyface Nelson is actually superb. But the resulting film is, like bad schoolboy history, just one damn thing after another. I finished up not really knowing why Dillinger loved Billie or why he felt compelled to do what he did or what was going on in Melvin Purvis head. Despite a classic shoot-out sequence it lacks the momentum for an action movie. And despite the ponderous pace and period detail, it lacks the beauty and complexity of a film like THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD. Which makes the movie ultimately an exercise in clever but ultimately vacuous film-making.

PUBLIC ENEMIES is on release in the USA, Canada, the UK, Greece, Denmark, France, Indonesia, Morocco, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Israel, Slovakia, South Korea, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia and Turkey. It opens on July 23rd in Belgium, Hong Kong, Russia, Singapore, Ukraine, Brazil, Norway, Sweden, Egypt, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Iceland, Germany, Portugal, Finland, Romania, Spain and Italy.