Latest Posts
Miami Vice
So masculine it could reverse a vasectomy, Michael Mann’s feature length Miami Vice actually tells the same story that eventually ground down the TV series – Crockett (now Colin Farrell, then Don Johnson) and Tubbs (now Jamie Foxx, then Philip Michael Thomas) go undercover with a drugs gang, get so deep they’re not sure which way they’re facing any more, then refind themselves before screaming towards a guns-blazing finale, designer clothes looking immaculate. Built from what look like a series of high-end international aftershave adverts showcasing the very pinnacle of fast living, it is an out and out exercise in cool glamour. So was the 1980s TV series, of course, but Mann (who … Read more
Three Times
Shu Qi and Chang Chen are the actors playing three different sets of lovers, in 1911, 1966 and 2005, in this unusually beautiful film from director Hou Hsiao-hsien. All three stories take place in Taiwan and focus on love in different manifestations – love in its glorious first flush, love thwarted, and love carnal – to show how milieu and mores affect what is usually seen as an immutable, timeless emotion. In 1911 a republican activist gets caught up in the world of a concubine. In 1966 a military conscript falls for a hostess at a pool hall. In 2005 a photographer loses his heart to a singer. Hou places the 1911 story in … Read more
The Alibi
Also known as Lies and Alibis, this is one of those “who’s zooming who” comic thrillers – a bit of Tarantino dialogue, some swish Soderbergh camerawork, a twisty LA Confidential-ish plot. And Steve Coogan’s in it too. Yes, that does seem like a slightly odd casting decision – a Brit actor best known in the UK for his portrayal of gauche local DJ Alan Partridge. As with the best Coogan performances there’s a touch of Partridge in his portrayal of Ray Elliot, the head of a company which provides alibis for players in the game of sexual infidelity. Ray’s only rule is that his company won’t provide an alibi if a crime has been … Read more
Neil Young: Heart of Gold
Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads film, Stop Making Sense, is one of the best concert documentaries ever made. Now he’s done the same favour for Neil Young, who was just recovering from a brain aneurysm when he delivered this two-part country set in Nashville. The title itself is something of a misnomer, or a hard sell (take your pick) since the first part of the concert is Young’s Prairie Wind album in its totality. It’s only in part two that Young gets the back catalogue out, mostly songs from Harvest, After the Gold Rush and Harvest Moon, his slight return to the acoustic-y banjo-y style of Harvest. As with Stop Making Sense Demme starts … Read more
Enemy at the Gates
Here’s a mixed bag of European war movie that is trying to be Saving Private Ryan in its impressive opening scenes, but looks as if it realises it doesn’t have the budget and so scales back the action to concentrate on two lone snipers. One German, one Russian. It’s set during the battle of Stalingrad, in which more than two million people died – yes, two million – and so the decision makes some logistical sense, even if it shortchanges the Russians and their epic level of sacrifice. The fact that it does that is what got the goat of a lot of historians masquerading as film critics, who suggested that the film … Read more
The Arrival of Wang
It’s L’arrivo di Wang in its original Italian, which still sounds bizarre, though perhaps slightly less fruity than it does in English, where the title suggests… the appearance of a Tarzanogram? The genre is sci-fi, so perhaps not, but if there’s one thing that this lo-fi offering has is plenty of intrigue. From the off we’re grabbed, as is our heroine Gaia (Francesca Cuttica), a jobbing Mandarin interpreter who is picked up out of the blue from her home one morning by a shady motorcade, blindfolded and taken to a government installation where the rest of the film plays out. What the government want from her, who they want her to act as interlocutor … Read more
Bleak House
If the film is often a novella, the TV mini-series is often the full-fat 600-pager, with Charles Dickens right up at the top of the list when it comes to cliffhanger endings to the week’s proceedings – the stories were often written for serialisation, Bleak House having appeared in 20 weekly editions of 32 pages plus illustrations. The BBC have something of a lock on Dickens, but their productions can be a bit dusty, more focused on the clothes than the action. But not this Bleak House. This 2005 outing is their best Dickens since 1994’s Martin Chuzzlewit and has the edge on its previous Bleak House, made in 1985 and starring Diana … Read more
26 August 2013-08-26
Out in the UK this week Something in the Air (Artificial Eye, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) If you’ve got any interest at all in how the revolutionary moment of 1968 spawned the postmodern (ie conservative) era that followed it, Olivier Assayas’s brilliant, period-distilling drama is for you. Following a wannabe artist from the revolutionary barricades of Paris, when it was required that all personal preferences came with political justification, through the long intellectual wrangles, splits, and factionalising of what was once called the Left, we follow a young man and woman on a journey that takes them from letting it all hang out to getting a decent job and knuckling down (or not). Musically … Read more
Bob Le Flambeur
If you’ve seen Frank Oz’s garbled heist movie The Score, starring Robert De Niro, Marlon Brando and Edward Norton, you might have asked how come three acting legends were inveigled into appearing in something so average. The answer is Bob Le Flambeur, the “one last heist” film they obviously thought they were channelling. Reeking of the late 40s but made in the 50s just as France was about to embark on the New Wave, it is the last word in Parisian chic, a mix of Gallic savoir faire, American hats and cars, dialogue drawled out the side of the mouth and jazz pouring out of radios, bars and nightclubs. Roger Duchesne plays white-haired … Read more
Just My Luck
Released as its star Lindsay Lohan enters a spiral of celebrity freefall, Just My Luck is directed by Donald Petrie, who is a dab hand at turning unbelievable Hollywood nonsense into something resembling a decent movie. So he almost managed to make you forget that the undercover cop and supposed frump in Miss Congeniality was the never-less-than-hot Sandra Bullock. Or that in the romcom How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days Kate Hudson … to be honest, it’s so whimsical and borderline nasty that I’m not going to go there. Here Petrie takes the still perky screen presence of Lohan and inserts her into a similarly whimsical and borderline nasty scenario – she’s … Read more
Stormbreaker
We’ve had young James Bond, courtesy of Charlie Higson, and the Spy Kids films, so there’s nothing that groundbreaking about Alex Rider, the mini-me spy and key character in Anthony Horowitz’s string of highly successful novels. 16-year-old Alex Pettyfer steps into the Rider role, his private school accent and rent boy looks making him ideal as the juvenile spy. Horowitz himself adapts his own novel. Which is a feat considering that he also writes the Power of Five series (known as The Gatekeepers in the US), has knocked out a Sherlock Holmes novel, a number of scripts for the long-running Sunday afternoon footwarmer Poirot, a whole raft of Midsomer Murders and he’s the creator … Read more
The Break-Up
What do you do when you’ve been in a high-profile relationship with Brad Pitt, only for it all to go spectacularly tits up? Jennifer Aniston went out and made a romcom about the perfect relationship and how it all went wrong. That might seem more than mere coincidence but anyone looking for coded digs at Brangelina from one half of Jett, Brenifer, or whatever the composite name for Brad and Jen was (have I just forgotten, or was the relationship doomed thanks to lack of a trash-mag moniker?) is going to have to get out the electron microscope. Yes, this is a romcom starring Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn as a couple who … Read more
