Steve

Pretty Persuasion

2023-10-312013-05-20 by Steve

Kimberly (Evan Rachel Wood) is a spiteful young wannabe actress and fulltime minx who accuses her teacher (Ron Livingston) of sexual harassment… partly for fun, partly to get some acting practice in, mostly for spite. And before you know it there’s a TV news crew camped out on the door, with an overeager reporter (Jane Krakowski) visibly almost aroused as she recounts the allegations. Pretty Persuasion would be a better film if it were a straighter film, or if it had gone all out for dark funnies. But there’s some real gold in this otherwise overstrained satire scraping the crud from the underside of the Bel Air idyll. Wood is remarkable as Kimberly, … Read more

District 13

2023-10-312013-05-19 by Steve

Free-running is the gimmick powering this actioner scripted and produced by French action powerhouse Luc Besson and also known as District B13 (B is for “Banlieue”). Set in a broken-down Paris in the near future, District 13 has an Escape from New York kind of vibe and follows a tough cop (Cyril Raffaelli) and a gangland desperado (David Belle) into a walled-off urban badland to sort out the guys who’ve nicked a nuclear weapon (it was the US president in Escape from New York). But back to the free-running, or le parkour as its French originators (one of whom is David Belle himself) call it – the adrenalised athletic stuntorama that could simply … Read more

Secuestro Express

2023-10-312013-05-19 by Steve

Inspired by the Latin American practice of secuestro express – or quickie kidnap – the Venezuelan Jonathan Jakubowicz’s debut feature tracks a miserable night in the life of a rich Caracas couple (Mia Maestro, Jean Paul Leroux) after a wild night out of partying ends with abduction at the hands of a trio of gun-happy barrio gangsters. We’re then with the couple and the banditos until the woman’s father (played by Rubén Blades) coughs up. And as the night of brutality wears on, nuance starts to push its way through what at first looked like stereotypes. Maybe our gangsters aren’t so bad; maybe our heroes aren’t so heroic. It’s a garishly lit thriller, … Read more

Dave Chappelle’s Block Party

2023-10-312013-05-19 by Steve

Hot off Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, director Michel Gondry takes an abrupt left turn with a documentary about US comedian Dave Chappelle hosting a block party in Brooklyn, where the likes of Kanye West, the Fugees, Jill Scott, Mos Def and Erykah Badu rock the house. Gondry has previous directing music videos so it’s not so much of a stretch but the idea is unusual – we watch as Chappelle organises things, calling in favours from friends, putting the celebrity lock on people too timid to turn him down while a camera is rolling, but most of all he’s handing out tickets to just about anyone he runs across in Dayton, … Read more

The Battle of the Sexes

2022-11-262013-05-18 by Steve

Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs mug for the camera

Telling the story of the hyperhyped tennis match between 55-year-old “male chauvinist pig” Bobby Riggs and the then reigning queen of tennis, Billie Jean King, this deceptively light documentary catches the casual and systemic sexism of the time, paints a warm, human picture of King and even has the grace to give the publicity hungry Riggs, now long dead, a decent screw. And the match really was hyped. If you were alive back then there is no way you won’t remember the furore when Riggs, who’d won Wimbledon in 1939 but had long since slipped into obscurity, came out of retirement to make a loud public announcement – the women’s game was feeble, … Read more

United 93

2023-10-312013-05-17 by Steve

A reconstruction of what happened on 11 September 2001 to the fourth hijacked plane, which went down in Pennsylvania before getting to its target in Washington DC, probably the White House. It’s shot in a documentary-like shaky-cam style, has not a single recognisable face to hook onto and there’s a complete absence of heroic Hollywood dialogue. Writer/director Paul Greengrass lets events unfold in real time which, coupled with the knowledge of how things pan out, has the effect of making every otherwise mundane detail – stewardesses sharing a joke, businessmen working on their laptops – unbearably poignant. As we have already seen in The Bourne Supremacy, Greengrass is a master of dramatic irony … Read more

Rize

2023-10-312013-05-17 by Steve

Fashion photographer and music-video director David LaChapelle’s documentary about Krumping, the brutally physical, adrenalised street dance movement in South Central LA which rose, in the aftermath of the 1992’s Rodney King riots, from the Clowning movement. Yes, clowning as in painting the face and putting on big baggy clothes. Think rap face-to-face showdowns, but instead of spinning rhymes they do the most ridiculously amazing dances with their body, the court of audience opinion more often than not deciding the winner. Both clowning and now krumping are a leftfield response to deprivation and the added blight of the gang culture and originally allowed those who do it to pass unmolested from one gang district … Read more

X-Men: The Last Stand

2023-10-312013-05-17 by Steve

The latest of the Marvel comics franchise is the most expensive film ever made but carries on just like the earlier two – lots of characters chasing too little plot. If you can call a po-faced allegory about society’s treatment of difference a plot. As ever Halle Berry looks nice, Hugh Jackman throws his chest out to good effect and Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen compete to see whose voice has the most actorly resonance. To flesh things out a bit more, the story hinges on a mutant called Leech, whose special power is the production of something – hormones, pheromones, slimy oozy stuff, call it what you will – which turns our … Read more

Love + Hate

2023-10-312013-05-16 by Steve

My heart often sinks when “the movies” decide to do a story of love across the racial divide. Too often the result is melodrama overplaying relatively unimportant differences (like skin colour) while underplaying the ones that do matter (ie culture). See Ken Loach’s Ae Fond Kiss, for example. Or, from the other end of the spectrum, the buffoonery of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Director Dominic Savage’s Love + Hate manages to avoid these pitfalls. It’s a “nice Asian girl meets racist white boy” story set in a town in Northern England and is Romeo and Juliet on a shoestring. At the Asian end of the relationship there’s the male/female double standards in an … Read more

Prime

2023-10-312013-05-16 by Steve

Uma Thurman’s had a strange career. In between wondrous hits like Baron Munchausen, Dangerous Liaisons, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill there have been total duds like… where do we start?… The Truth About Cats and Dogs, The Avengers and Be Cool, to pick just three from many. Prime falls definitely into the latter camp. It’s a toyboy rom-com with Uma Thurman (37) falling for Bryan Greenberg (23) and confiding all the bedroom secrets (“his penis is so beautiful, I just want to knit it a hat”) to her therapist, who unbeknown to Uma is the younger man’s mother. Writer/director is Ben Younger who was responsible for the intense money-man drama Boiler Room and … Read more