Kids flick preview 2: MR MAGORIUM'S WONDER EMPORIUM

MR MAGORIUM'S WONDER EMPORIUM is a beautifully imagined and rendered movie about a magical toyshop and the people who work there. Dustin Hoffman is love-able and wise as the old toy-maker and Natalie Portman is typically charming as his assistant Molly Mahoney. Young Zach Mills is truly impressive as the quirky kid who spends all day playing with toys there. Even Jason Bateman is impressive in an uncharacteristically restrained role as a buttoned-down accountant. But the real star of the show is the Wonder Emporium itself. Its the craziest most fantabulous toy store you could ever imagine, with beautiful magic toys bursting out of every corner and kids actually allowed to play with them!

The problem with the movie is that is rests too heavily on its only theme. Mr Magorium is not long for this world: hence the accountant is brought in to tot up the value of the shop for Mahoney's inheritance. The prevailing theme of this children's theme is, then, death and grieving, and the idea that it is best to honour the lives of those we love by moving on and living our own lives rather than grieving indefinitely. In addition, we need to believe in ourselves. This is all good stuff and the film delivers this adult subject matter sensitively to its target audience. The problem is that there simply isn't enough richness to the character development or genuine suspence to sustain the already slim run-time. It's pretty obvious from the start that Mahoney will find the courage to take on her inheritance and that the accountant's heart will soften, echoing Helm's script for STRANGER THAN FICTION. So, maybe one for DVD...?

MR MAGORIUM'S WONDER EMPORIUM is on release in Brazil, Canada, Taiwan, Turkey, the US, the Philippines, Israel and Poland. It opens next week in Germany, the Netherlands, and on December 13th in Australia, Russia, Singapore, Spain and the UK. It opens later in December in South Korea, Belgium and Hong Kong. I topens in Belgium and Hong Kong at the end of January 2008 and in Norway, Italy, France, Egypt and Japan in February. It opens in Finland in March.

Kids flick preview 1: ENCHANTED

ENCHANTED begins as a closely observed spoof of Disney's SLEEPING BEAUTY. A handsome prince meets a beautiful princess but their fairytale marriage is ruined by a wicked stepmother who can transform into a dragon. She banishes the lovely Giselle to New York - "a place where no-one lives happily ever after". Giselle (Amy Adams) is quickly followed by her Prince Edward (James Marsden), his treacherous servant Nathaniel (Timothy Spall) and finally by the wicked stepmother herself (Susan Sarandon). Giselle is taken in by a handsome, cynical, divorce lawyer (Patrick Dempsey) and his cute daughter, Morgan.

The movie manages to have its cake and eat it. ENCHANTED wants us cynical ironic post-modern audiences to have a little more faith in true love. But it also wants the Disney heroines of old to have a little more pluck, and perhaps go on a date or two before falling in love at first sight. It's a far more delicate and honest approach to the position of the fairy-tale cartoon in contemporary cinema than those aggressively post-modern CGI flicks.

The best parts of the movie takes us along with them because the actors are playing this preposterous scenario absolutely straight. Dempsey and Marsden do well in this, but it's Amy Adams who is truly charming. I felt that Timothy Spall and Susuan Sarandon were a little too broadly drawn - simply too camp - especially Sarandon in her platform heels and glitter lipstick. Frankly she looked like a drag queen, as though she was consciously sending up Disney and winking at the audience. This broke the delicate balance between fairy-tale and modernity but thankfully her role in relatively small and the movie survives this small mis-step.

ENCHANTED is on release in Italy, Indonesia, the Philippines, the US, Israel, Russia, Singapore, Spain, France, Malaysia, Portugal and Estonia. It opens next week in Greece, Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy and Venezuela. It opens on December 14th in Austria, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Brazil and the UK. It opens later in December in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Turkey, Australia and Norway. It opens in Australia, South Korea and Poland in January 2008 and in Taiwan on February 7th. It opens in Japan on March 14th.

THE NINES - tricksy, smart, but not quite convincing

THE NINES is a movie that is tricksy and smart and gripping, in parts, but I was too often reminded of other movies that had covered the same ground more convincingly.

The movie was written and directed by Hollywood screen-writer John August (CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, BIG FISH). It deals with issues of fact and fiction in a manner reminiscent of Charlie Kauffman movies. It deals with haunting coincidence in the manner of THE NUMBER 23. It satirises the Hollywood/network TV game in the manner of THE TRUMAN SHOW or EDTV. All these movies and more were swimming round my head during this film. The only thing that was genuinely new was the fact that Ryan Reynolds was given room to flex his acting chops, to great effect.

The movie has three inter-twining strands starring a trio of actors playing different actors, sometimes reminiscent of John August - sometimes just playing themselves. In the first strand, Reynolds plays a network TV star. He goes on a drug-fuelled binge and ends up under house arrest, being babyset by his publicist, played by McCarthy. His "desperate housewife" neighbour, played by Hope Davis, starts a flirtation with him, but it's soon clear that both she and the publicist hate each other and are hiding things from him. The tone of this strand is uneasiness - sort of similar to INLAND EMPIRE but infinitely more straightforward. There's a fair amount of spooooky seeing and hearing number nine everywhere but the reason for this is also straightforward. Hope Davis' character is jealous of McCarthy's overweight publicist. Ranked out of ten, she thinks Reynolds' TV star belongs with the nines.

The second strand sees Reynolds playing a TV writer based on the real-life John August. He's trying to get his pilot picked up by the network represented by Hope Davis' exec. The network want the writer to drop his best friend from the cast - Melissa McCarthy - and replace her with the more svelte real-life actress Dahlia Salem. She'll appeal more to the test audiences who loved the pilot - the ones who ranked it "in the nines". Reynolds' character's moral vacuity is captured on reality TV. He muses on the fact that while he plays god with his characters, for the reality TV producers, he's merely a puppet.

The TV pilot is about a wife (McCarthy) and a kid (Elle Fanning). The husband (Reynolds) leaves them in a forest to go call for help. He is intercepted by a hotter chick (Davis) who once again fears that his domesticated life with his fat wife is holding him back from his true potential. He's a video game designer who's over-stepping the boundaries in his self-designed Second Life.

I find the issues raised by THE NINES compelling. The increasing availability to consumers of virtual worlds. The moral redundancy of network TV and especially of reality TV shows. The superficiality of modern society. But John August never convinced me that he was fully in control of them. What's more, he retreads on ground that was broken by Kauffman almost a decade ago. All this, makes this a film that one can probably overlook.

THE NINES played Sundance 2007 and went on release in the US in August. It is currently on release in the UK.

HITMAN - now, if you were a super-smart assassin would you really walk around with a conspicuous bar-code tatooed to your skull?

HITMAN is a surprisingly good action movie despite its genesis as a video game and the imbecility of the bar-code in the back of the head. Not that I have anything against video games: I've spent many a happy weekend kicking seven shades of crap out of the Parthians with my cataphract cavalry. However, in my experience it's much more fun to blow shit up yourself than to outsource the blowing up of shit. Added to that, a lot of VG adaptations make zero attempt to super-impose silly little things like...well...plot or character development onto the stylised violence of the source material.

In this respect, HITMAN is miles ahead of any other VG adaptation, though still a goodly mile behind the best of the spy/assassin genre. For a start, the violence is not as stylised and unrealistic as you sometimes get, and it's actually surprisingly discreet. Oftentimes the camera cuts away from the worst of it. Second, the production design is full of care, attention, atmosphere and, presumably, cold hard cash. Our protagonist, Agent 47, guns down a Russian premier in St Petersburg, before heading to Istanbul. All the while he stays in lush hotels and drives swankier cars than, say, James Blonde. A particular marvel is the creation of the FSB headquarters, which is all diffused light in baroque corridors.

But the biggest win is the script by Skip Woods, who also wrote the super-stylish SWORDFISH (one of the coolest opening scenes in cinema.) His Agent 47, portrayed by Timothy Olyphant, has a dry wit and a moral centre. But he never betrays his psycho upbringing in a sort of Catholic boarding school cum assassin training camp. I love the fact that the film-makers resist the temptation to have a teen fantasy sex-scene between Agent 47 and his Russian damsel in distress (Olga Kurylenko). I also invested in the relationship between Agent 47 and his nemesis, Brit copper Mike Whittier (Dougray Scott), as well as buddy cop relationship between Whittier and his side-kick, Jenkins (Michael Offei.)

Don't get me wrong. HITMAN is no work of genius. Any movie that has to tell viewers that London is in England or that Istanbul is in Turkey is playing to a low common denominator. And don't even get me started on the fictitious Russo-Turkish border! But I have to say that I had a good time watching this flick, and when they make the inevitable sequel, I'll anticipate it with more eagerness that I did its predecessor.

HITMAN is on release in Canada, Egypt, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, the US, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Lebanon, Indonesia, Taiwan, Belgium, Greece, the Netherlands, Peru, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Korea, Colombia, Denmark, Estonia, Iceland, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Turkey and the UK. It opens next Friday in Australia, New Zealand, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Rumania and on December 13th in Bolivia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Brazil, Finland, Sweden and Chile. It opens on December 26th in France; on January 24th in Argentina and in Japan on April 5th 2008.

SLEUTH (2007) - an alpha gamma movie

Kenneth Branagh's new adaptation of SLEUTH stands on the shoulders of a giant and boxes his ears. It is an adaptation that aggressively throws off the look, feel and subject matter of its original and fails and succeeds in large measures.

The original movie was adapted by Anthony Shaffer from his own play and featured an elegant, enjoyable battle of wits between an arrogant aristo crime writer called Wyke (Olivier) and a "jumped up pantry boy" who is sleeping with Wyke's wife (Caine.) Makiewicz' direction was simple and stagey - allowing the actors and the script to do their work.

In Branagh's version, the script has been written by Harold Pinter. It looses all lightness and malovolent wit and becomes a heavy-handed obvious clunking sort of thing. There is no needling - just a sort of simple play-ground bragging of the "my car is bigger than your car" kind. Highly unedifying. Michael Caine moves from the up-start to the older man character and replaces Olivier's bumptious arrogance with a sort of heavy brooding. It's not a lot of fun to watch. Jude Law takes over the Caine character and in that character is stiff and self-conscious and highly unconvincing. Which leaves the direction. Branagh has decided to gut out the tudor interior and replace it with an aggressively modern interior design powered by hi-tech CCTV. Unlike Mankiewicz, he is going to use the power that the medium of cinema gives him with odd camera angles. Much as the conch symbolised authority in Lord of the Flies, the iPod remote symbolises power here. I found the use of CCTV visuals and the extreme production design incredibly distracting and heavy-handed. It took me a good hour of this film's short run-time to actually focus on the action. I also disliked Branagh's cheap insider jokes. Do we really need Jude Law to ask Michael Caine, "what's it all about?" Do we really need him to appropriate the manic laugh of the wind-up toy in the 1972 film? And is Law in that black leather coat meant to be referencing Gigolo Joe from A.I.?

So, for the most part, this movie is an admirably grand failure. In other words, it fails because of too much ambition and too many new ideas, rather than because of laziness and indifference. (See GOOD LUCK CHUCK). But I did like two things very much. First, I thought Law, in a small section near the end of the movie, known to all those who've seen the original, was very convincing. Second, I very much liked the final twenty minutes. The sexual tension was palpable and for the first time I was genuinely intrigued and thrilled by the script and performances. So, an alpha gamma movie overall.

SLEUTH played Venice and Toronto 2007 and was released earlier this year in Spain, the US, Israel, Italy, Norway and Sweden. It is currently on release in the UK and opens this Friday in Denmark. SLEUTH opens in December in Turkey, Germany and Hungary and in January in Finland and the Netherlands. It opens in Australia on February 7th 2008.

SLEUTH (1972) - Superlative British class satire

The original 1972 version of SLEUTH is regarded by many as a cinematic masterpiece. It simply oozes quality. It's the last film of director Joseph L Mankiewicz, who also directed the undoubted pantheon flicks CLEOPATRA and ALL ABOUT EVE. It stars Laurence Olivier at the height of his game and the then upcoming actor Michael Caine - both of whom were nominated for Oscars, along with Mankiewicz for direction and John Addison for the score. The razor-sharp script was adapted by Anthony Shaffer from his own award-winning play. The set-up is simplicity itself. We are in a lush tudor country house crammed with tricksy toys and games and inhabited by a deeply prejudiced, arrogant old duffer called Andrew Wyke (Olivier.) He is meeting a young, handsome working-class-boy-made-good called Milo (Caine.) Wyke's wife is about to leave him for Milo and they are meeting to have a civilised discussion about the divorce. Wyke taunts Milo about his lower class origins and goads Milo into a robbery that will help finance Wyke's soon to be ex-wife's expensive lifestyle. As far as Wyke is concerned, Milo is another toy to play with and ultimately stitch up. The joy of Shaffer's play is watching the resilient working-class boy battle psychologically and intellectually with his self-appointed better. It's a wonderful indictment of class snobbery - a genuine tease and brilliantly acted and directed to boot.

I hesitate to call this a pantheon movie, though, because it always feels a little artificial. There is no attempt to soften the stagey-ness. The cast is small, the dialogue intense and artificial, and we are obviously on a set. I suppose in a way this could be seen a strength of this adaptation. Mankiewicz has the confidence to let the words and the actors do their job without too many forced visual whistles and bells. Indeed, the very crux of the plot twist relies upon the audience willingly suspending its disbelief and forgiving the production its inability to pull off a certain visual gag.

Despite this minor quibble, SLEUTH remains a social satire that is, to quote RED DWARF, Swiftian in its rapier-like subtlety. The battle of wits it embodies is thrilling to watch and has penetrated British culture to the extent that "you're a jumped up pantry boy who never knew his place" will be familiar to pop music fans who were born years after the flick was released. Definitely one to watch.

The original cinematic adaptation of SLEUTH was released in 1972 and is widely available on DVD.