First Time Viewings: 2006

The 15 minute ballet of the red shoes in the middle of this film may be the single most beautiful thing ever captured on celluloid.

A guilty pleasure. Rather than update the TV show (which, being English, I've never seen) the Brady's are simply transplanted as their 1970's selves into the 90's. Good natured, very funny and well cast.

Sam Mendes' underrated third film is a war movie in which the war barely happens. It's a funny and important comment on modern warfare beautifully played by a cast of some of the finest actors Hollywood has to offer right now.

A brilliant and disturbing new film from Michael Haneke. Dread absolutely suffuses this film from first frame to last as Haneke uses long and often static takes to implicate you the viewer in what happens. The one brief act of violence is among the most shocking I've seen and the leading performances of Daniel Auteil and Juliette Binoche are excellent. It's even better on a second viewing.

Beautiful and brilliant. A technicolour masterpiece told entirely in song with wonderfully sensetive performances.

Powered by a pair of truly exceptional performances and by an outstanding set of songs sure to win over purists and newcomers alike (Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon do their own vocals and are not only note perfect but so close vocally to Johnny Cash and June Carter that you would swear they are miming). Walk the Lne is a grand return to form for director James Mangold and the best biopic to come out of Hollywood in a good while.

At first glance a letdown after Old Boy the final part of Park Chan Wook's vengeance trilogy revealed itself as a brilliant film on second viewing. Lee Young Ae is extraordinary as Geum Ja, both the Lady Vengeance of the English title and the Kind Hearted Miss Geum Ja of the original Korean. Choi Min Sik lends able support and Park Chan Wook demonstrates yet again that he's among the world's most exciting new directors.

Highly recommended. A classic screwball comedy.

Appaling but for two things. Kate Winslet, who nicks the movie as a mancunian nymphomaniac and Christopher Walken who does his randomly inflected speech thing for two scenes. Sadly neither are n it long and the rest is teeth grindingly awful.

Not as good as it's reputation. Jack Lemmon is as great as ever but Shirley MacLaine just grates and for a Billy Wilder comedy there's a distinct lack of laughs

An exceptional film on a difficult subject. Paradise Now tries to accurately portray two Palestinian friends chosen for a 'martydom operation'. It's careful not to endorse their actions instead leaving us to think what we will. The performances are wonderful and the film as a whole almost uniquely disturbing.

A much lauded and, frankly, extraordinary performance from Amy Adams is certainly a great reason to see this film but it's far from the only one. The whole cast are fine, particularly Embeth Davidtz, the script is funny and highly quotable and director Phil Morrison keeps things moving along at pace. However it works less well as whole on second viewing, hence the re-rating.

Will bore you to death, one way or another.

Unutterably, cancerously poor. Avoid as though it were the black death.

The debut of the luminous Zhang Ziyi, working for the first of many times for her mentor Zhang Yimou in a beautifully told and affecting romance.

The best noir since The Last Seduction. Another exceptional performance from Joseph Gordon Levitt who is fast becoming one of the most interesting young actors in Hollywood anchors the film and Lukas Haas is also great as young drug lord 'The Pin'. The script is brilliant and it ends with an absolute gut punch of a twist.

Jackie Chan's worst film. As much fun as a root canal

A brilliant, sober, deeply sad, telling of the events on the fourth of the hijacked planes on 9/11. Paul Greengrass' film has an almost eerie ring of truth thanks to many people playing themselves and much dialogue being taken from transcripts. It's not film of the year only because it is so utterly shattering an emotional experience that I've no desire to ever see it again, despite its unimpeachable brilliance.

Robert Altman says that the setup of 3 Women came to him in a dream. This makes perfect sense as you watch the film which proceeds from the first frame in a very strange, dreamlike fashion.
Shelly Duvall and Sissy Spacek were, apparently, part of Altman's dream the night the film took shape and both of them are excellent. Duvall is funny and sad as the girl who is always saying how many people are interested in her when, as we see, almost nobody is. Spacek plays her innocent adrift once more. She's still brilliant at it and, crucially, still looks young enough to pull it off. Spacek takes the acting honours though with a third act twist that completely alters her character making her, at a stroke, more sexual and otherwise more adult. This could have undone the film had Alman not had an actress as capable as Spacek of carrying off the sudden shift.
At just over two hours it is a bit long and the third woman of the title (Janice Rule) is largely superfluous but when it focuses in on Spacek and Duvall this is Altman at his best.

A highly entertaining twist on the Robin Hood legend with teriffic performances from Connery and Hepburn.

Actually a sequel to Armour of God this is one of Jackie's most entertaining films of (relatively) recent times. The action, stunts and comedy are non stop and the film is marred only by an astoundingly racist portrayl of the arab characters.

To begin with Lawn Dogs seems a pleasent film, but nothing earth shattering but it sucks you in with a sensetive screenplay and well drawn characters that you come really to care for.
As Devon Mischa Barton is the anchor of the film and she's absolutely fantastic, showing an understanding of her character far beyond her tender years. There's challenging material for her too as the layers of her character slowly reveal themselves.
Sam Rockwell is also excellent as Trent. He's hardly squeaky clean (he's been to prison) but he's well meaning and relatively smart, smart enough to know how people will react to him and Devon being friends. The way Devon charms him works for the film because, first of all, it works for us but also because both treat it as an utterly innocent thing.
The scenes that Rockwell and Barton share are simply joyous, whether they are stealing chickens, dancing on the roof of Rockwell's truck or, in an enormously touching moment, showing each other their scars. That's my favourite moment of the film. Devon's scar is in the middle of her chest and when she starts to open her dress to show trent something Bartons delivery of "It's not my chest I want to show you, stupid" when he turns away is just perfect.
The cast is uniformly fantastic with Kathleen Quinlan and Christopher McDonald as Devon's parents and the brilliant Beth Grant cameoing as Trent's mum.

This high concept body swap comedy has already been made at least twice the first version featured Jodie Foster and the second was a recent TV movie. Obviously then the story works, or, it did.
Brought kicking and screaming into the early 20th century we now get (joy) insufferably poor pop punk music as a major plot point and a seriously creepy set of romantic misunderstandings.
Lindsay Lohan isn't bad and Jamie Lee Curtis gives a solid comic performance ("I'm like the cryptkeeper") but they've little to work with as the plot-o-matic 3000 churns out 90 minutes of mildy diverting, occasionally funny, situations and few trite life lessons. It's not that this is a truly awful film, just that it has little to ditinguish itself, a shame from the team that gave us Mean Girls.

If there's a better young actress in the world right now than Evan Rachel Wood I don't know who it is. The 18 year old puts in another excellent performance here. The film is what you'd expect to get if you put Heathers, Mean Girls and The Last Seduction in a blender. Aside from Wood there's great support from James Woods (hillariously slimy) and Jane Krakowski (sexy and funny as a lesbian reporter for the local news).

Just like the 1977 version this King Kong is a travesty, an insult to a great movie and waste of a lot of talent and money. To say nothing of 170 minutes I'm never getting back.

An intermittently funny compilation of three episodes, much funnier in the opening acts when the focus is on the family than the time travelling third episode which is all Stewie.

Any comic book reader knows the story. 4 people go into space, get hit by 'cosmic waves' develop superpowers. The movie keeps this basic premise and makes of it Earth's dullest superhero film.
The central problem is the The 'Fantastic' Four do almost nothing. They whinge a bit about how their powers have changed them, then have a scrap with ex business partner Victor Von Doom which, despite it's having NOTHING to do with anyone else puts some other New Yorkers in danger yet, somehow, get them hailed as heroes.
The super power of one of the horribly mis-named four is super strength and resilience, because he's now made of rock. Frankly all the performers are so devoid of emotion you'd think all the actors were in fact made of rock.
Ioan Gruffurd is about 10 years too young to be Reed Richards and emotionlessly exposists for all he's worth. Chris Evans is at least a comic faithful Johnny Storm but Lord he's annoying, mostly because he's got all the acting talent of your average log. Jessica Alba is also an excruciatingly bland Sue Storm while Julian McMahon seldom advances beyond a single expression (bored, for the record). The only half decent performance is from Michael Chicklis who at least tries to bring some of Thing's conflict about his powers to the screen.
The effects are passable (though Reed's stretching just looks wierd, clearly they still haven't got a handle on CG skin) and the Thing make up is about as good as could have been expected and the dedication to the comic book look just about earns this sorry excuse for a film a second point.
Piss awful, avoid at all costs.

Some great music (a joyous Jesus Walks), some not so great (The Fugees reunion is an anticlimax) and a central figure who is as often annoying as he is funny makes Michel Gondry's latest less interesting than it should be. Still, the holy grail if you're a big rap fan.

Absolutely charming romantic comedy which manages to be funny (all too rare) and have a relationship that you'll actually care about (yet more rare). The script may be derivative, it's Big with a sex change, but it's held up by teriffic turns from the whole cast, most notably Jennifer Garner.

I've no idea what other people see in this. I disliked the fact that most of the characters sounded the same, that they were all so damn shallow and that I couldn't identify with them one iota.

Naomi Watts is wonderful, particularly when playing Ellie's auditions (bless he heaart Ellie's not much of an actress) but rest of this DV shot movie is teeth grindingly annoying. Horribly played and written and packed with the most obvious set of 'insights' into Hollywood you'll ever see. JUST worth it for a BIG Watts fan though.

Violent, opressive and nasty, as an extreme horro film should be. Scrapbook is clearly low budget and some of the acting and camerawork is a little ametuerish but this actually adds to the grimy reality of the thing and makes it quite a disturbing watch.

Good news and bad for Mann fans. Good: This is definitely a Michael Mann film, it's very blue indeed. Bad: Gong Li can't act and speak English all at once. Jamie Foxx might as well not be here. Colin Farrell acts with his hideous mullet and tache. All the night sequences are so grainy they apper to have been shot through a teabag. It's duller than a wet Wednesday in Wales.

An honest to god horror masterpiece. Compltely real, absolutely frightening

An exploitation classic. Watch it and marvel at the breadth of influence it has had.

Torture. Like watching a hideously poor college project with added gore and boobs.

Many times over the last few years I've reiterated my admiration for the new wave of South Korean actors, writers and directors. I'm aware that this may be getting a touch boring but then they will insist on making great film after great film.
Addicted, made in 2002, is no exception. Ho Jin (Lee Eol) and Eun Soo (Lee Mi Yeon) are a married couple in their early thirties living with Ho Jin's younger brother Dae Jin (Lee Byung Hun) as a lodger. One day both brothers are involved in seperate car accidents, Dae Jin in the race he is driving in and Ho Jin in a taxi on the way to that race. Both are sent into comas but only Dae Jin wakes up. However on his return from the hospital he seems different, he takes up his brother's work and pastimes and then reveals that, though it is Dae Jin's body which is back from hospital he is, in fact, Ho Jin.
The supernatural romance concept isn't particularly new, this film has echoes of many others, Truly Madly Deeply comes to mind immediately though here we're not dealing with ghosts. What is different about Addicted is not so much the initial concept as the way it unfolds and keeps you guessing as to the outcome even beyond the final frames.
Much of the film is carried on the shoulders of Lee Byung Hun and Lee Mi Yeon. Byung Hun is simply one of the finest young actors in world cinema besides this he'll be best known to international audiences for A Bittersweet Life or perhaps Park Chan Wook's segment of Three Extremes. Addicted is his finest hour to date, he's absolutely fantastic, playing the subtle shadings of his character and its various incarnations often in silence but always completely truthfully. As great as Byung Hun is Lee Mi Yeon is even better, she's great with dialogue certainly but it's almost more interesting watching her react to others dialogue, witness her flat out brilliant performance in the scene where the man she's known as Dae Jin at last convinces her that he is Ho Jin (it's easier to follow than to write about, I promise). The chemistry between the two crackles, particularly in a lengthy and tender love scene.
Regrettably I can't talk about the dramatic turn of events in the last act. It's something that really could go either way but, for me anyway, it works like a charm and allows director Park Yeong Hoon to play merry hell with the audiences emotions.
Park leaves things unresolved at the end, not in a bad, untidy way, it's simply that he doesn't provide answers as to how the late twist in the tale will be dealt with and this uncertainty is one of the many things that mean Addicted is a movie that if you see it as part of a larger audience you will be talking and probably arguing about and one you'll remember for much longer than most of the present Hollywood dreck which seems to slip from my mind as I rise from my seat.

I'll be amazed if there is a funnier single scene this year than Olive's dance routine, wonderful.

Worth seeing if only for the ever wonderful Catherine Keener.

Decent enough but with too much time spent away from the cortroom the drama, despite fine leading performances, never catches light.

I was really excited about this one. James Ellroy's book is dense and brilliant, yes it looked all but impossible to carve a movie out of it but it had been done with LA Confidential, why not this one too?. Reasons for optimism piled up: Brian DePalma, back on the kind of film that made his name, a cast full of talent (and Josh Hartnett), posters and stills that suggested the macabre mood of the book had been done justice to.
Where did it all go wrong?
Elizabeth Short was an aspiring actress who, on January 15th 1947, was found dead in Crenshaw Los Angeles. She had been cut in half, her organs ripped out, her body drained of blood and her mouth slit open ear to ear. The killer was never caught or identified. Ellroy's book and DePalma's film don't attempt to tell the real story, instead they use this crime as a jumping off point for a complex noir.
Ellroy's Dhalia is a thick book, stuff would always need removing, but DePalma and screenwriter Josh Friedman have started in the wrong places. Almost all detail of the investigation is gone from the film. The Dahlia is a mere cameo, even as a presence, and seems incidental to events. This is a catastrophic miscalculation for several reasons. First of all the romantic and other entanglements of the two cops working the Dahlia case (Hartnett and Eckhart) an ex gangster's mol (Johannson) and a society girl (Swank) who knew Elizabeth Short aren't as interesting and, frankly, we've seen it before. The other problem that dropping most of the actual detective work from the film gives DePalma is that it makes the final act utterly ludicrous. The whodunnit is solved in a way that barely connects with anything else in the movie and is then explained by people we've barely met with motives that beggar belief.
On the plus side you'll never find a Brian DePalma film looking rubbish and this is no exception. The evocation of period is excellent and the whole film looks stunning (though DePalma's still stealing, look for shots from Double Indemnity and Vertigo) and this is where the chief pleasures of the film are found as there's precious little else to admire.
Hartnett is a blank presence as Bucky Bleichert ambling through every scene with the same expression and the same tone. Johannson is fine, she looks the part certainly, but she's little of consequence to do and, honestly, I'd rather watch Barbara Stawyck than watch Johannson trying to channel her. Hillary Swank is dreadful. She chooses a strange clipped accent that comes and goes more or less as it pleases and decides that's about enough as far as acting goes. However the worst performance comes from a ludicrously OTT Fiona Shaw as Swank's mother, you'll want to strangle her the second she speaks.
There are two performances though which keep the film from being more or less a dead loss on a performance level. Eckhart is teriffic in his limited screentime as Lee Blanchard, his coiled spring nergy bringing the film a fire it otherwise lacks. Even better is a film stealing Mia Kirshner as Betty Short. glimpsed in movies and audition reels (with Brian DePalma, offscreen, playing the director). She's wonderful as the innocent adrift, desperate to make it.
The Black Dhalia is a mess and that's a real shame as there's a truly great film in Ellroy's novel. Hopefully the upcoming film that puports to adress the real facts of the case will better serve Betty Short.

Like Anchorman; the first film from the team of Adam McKay and Will Ferrell Talladega Nights is a patchy film but when it is funny it's very very funny indeed but there are several dead patches (though, admittedly, some of them may be down to the fact that, as a Brit, I've no familliarity with Nascar).
Comedy like this really hinges on the performances and they are a decidedly mixed bag. Ferrell isn't great, he's very restrained compared to his Anchorman persona and seems often to just be going through the motions. However there's a large and enjoyable supporting cast arond Ferrell to pick up the slack. Gary Cole (an underappreciated comic talent who I loved in The Brady Bunch Movie in particular) and Jane Lynch (Andy's boss in 40 Year Old Virgin) are teriffic as Ricky Bobby's parents. Leslie Bibb is sexy and funny as his wife and Molly Shannon puts in a very funny cameo as the constanly drunk wife of the Nascar team owner Ricky works for.
Two performances stick out though. John C Reilly reveals a real gift for improvisational comedy as Cal but Sacha Baron Cohen walks off with the film as Jean Girard. Every moment Girard is on screen is milked for every laugh it's worth and Baron Cohen is simply uproarious with his terrible French accent and his absolute willingness to do whatever it takes for a joke.
Other cast members get lost, among them Michael Clarke Duncan and the lovely Amy Adams who is shamefully wasted in a total nothing of a part.
Patchy though it is Talladega Nights is still a perfectly decent timewater but don't expect a comedy classic.

Clerks II was, for me, an experience much like Before Sunset. Each film sequelised one I loved and yet never thought needed following up and each proved a happy surprise, providing a welcome reunion with old friends after rather too long.
That, though, is where the similarities end. Clerks II, though Smith's most mature, and in many ways, most emotional film retains everything the fans want from Smith. The wisecracks are present and correct, Jay and Silent Bob return, the pop culture dissections are back and there's an industrial strength helping of dick jokes.
Brian O'Halloran and Jeff Anderson slip seamlessly back into character as Dante and Randall and it's easy to believe that there has been 10 plus years of off screen interplay between them because the chemistry works and the dialogue between them flows easily. The quality hasn't dipped either, the jokes are often side spilitting, with Randall's impassioned defence of various racial slurs being a particular gut buster. Randall has new foil in this film in the form of 19 year old uber geek Elias (Fehrman), it would have been easy just to make him the butt of Randall's jokes but Fehrman is excellent, working up audience sympathy and getting one of the biggest laughs in the movie (Pillowpants).
Rosario Dawson is a ray of sunshine and threatens to steal the whole movie with her charming and funny turn ( I defy you not to fall a bit in love with her as she dances to ABC) but she's not afraid to speak some deeply filthy dialogue for laughs either.
It's great to see Jay and Silent Bob back too, with a newly sober Jason Mewes on great form, particularly in one moment that is at once one of the film's most amusing moments and one of the most disturbing things I've seen at a cinema.
There is a downside though. The feeling of familliarity was nice for the most part but the problem with it is that Dante's dilemma is exactly the same as it was in Clerks, he has to choose between to girls and his fiance (played by Smith's wife, Jennifer Scwallbach) is so obviously wrong for him that it undermines the choice. Why couldn't she have been just a nice girl that he just doesn't love as much as he thinks he does rather than a shrew who speaks for him and sports a Mrs Hicks t-shirt? It's also unfortunate that while Mrs Smith is good looking and probably very nice whatever else she is she's not an actress. She's flatter than a piece of paper that has just been run over by a steamroller.
That said Clerks had patchy acting too and it never really detracts from the film that much. This is a film for those already converted, it's a fans movie and on that level it's a triumph, no classic perhaps but still an enjoyable time with old friends.

I have previously bemoaned (most recently in refernce to Freedomland) just how far the career of the great Julianne Moore has fallen. Okay, everyone makes a poor choice every now and then but Moore's career has been, since Far From Heaven and The Hours, for both of which she was deservedly nominated for Oscars in a single year, in what seems at this stage to be a terminal decline. Trust The Man does her no favours in this respect, rather than giving her a ladder to climb out of the grave she's digging for her career husband and Director Freundlich has handed her a shovel.
The story is one you've seen a million times; two couples going through relationship woes. That's all you need to know about the story.
Right from the off I started to get the feeling I wasn't going to like Trust The Man as it opens with an utterly uninspiring credit sequence which does nothing to get us into the story, instead it just sits there. However this is about the highlight, simply because it features none of the main 'characters'.
I use the word character advisedly. Trust The Man barely has them, we spend two hours with, almost exclusively, four people and by the end we know nothing more about them than we do by the end of the first scene they appear in. This is because Freundlich's script gives none of them a personality, they are ciphers with one (or less) persoanlity trait each (Gyllenhaal's character wants a baby, Crudup's is afraid of death, etc) indeed they would struggle to ccome up with a personality between them.
The film looks perfectly okay, but never more, and often less. Freundlich directs in standard issue rom-com (though there's precious little rom here and no com whatsoever) fashion, bright and flat.
There isn't a single line in the film that rings true. All the dialogue is false, forced and anytime the film tries to be remotely serious it comes off as pretentious.
Events feel contrived too, particularly an excruciating finale at the play Moore's character is appearing in and side characters flutter in and out to no purpose (for example does Ellen Barkin's publisher actually publish Gyllenhaal's novel).
Freundlich can't be expected to take all the blame though as the performances are, frankly, completely wretched. Moore, previously incapable of seeming false on screen, is just terrible, betraying almost no emotion during any scene. She and Duchovny display little of the chemistry which made the ludicrous Evolution function. Duchovny too gives a blank performance. It's left to Billy Crudup to flail around, wave his arms and give a big performance as the 'comic relief' of the film and Maggie Gyllenhaal flounders, lost with a complete nothing of a character, trying hard but coming off like she's in high school drama.
Trust The Man is torturously poor, there's not a frame that feels true, not a second that isn't derivative not a line that doesn't sound stupid and not a joke you've not heard told, better, before. Please, for the love of all that is good and holy, can somebody slap Julianne Moore out of her coma and bring back the fantastic actress I miss?

Perfectly entertaining Bond film. Most notable for a nice turn from the ludicrously beautiful Sophie Marceau, hamming it up and for asking us to believe Denise Richards is a nuclear scientist.

This remake of Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs (which I've not seen, though I'm now going to see the whole trilogy) has been lauded as Martin Scorsese's best film since Goodfellas. It certainly is his best for a long time, and it's his first really great film since Casino.
The film takes the skeleton of IA's plot and resets it in Boston's Irish mafia. DiCaprio is the cop undercover in the mob while Damon is the gangster posing as a cop and both their worlds revolve around Jack Nicholson's mob boss Frank Costello.
The first notable thing about The Departed is the cast list. It's a formiddable selection of names. DiCaprio, if not yet the latter day DeNiro, is Marty's new muse and his performance here suggests that Scorsese's faith is not misplaced. It's the most vital performance he's given since This Boy's Life, both forceful and contained but always real. He sparks brilliantly off Nicholson, particularly in an improvised scene where Costello flat out accuses DiCaprio's Billy Costigan of being the informer in his crew. He lets us see Billy's fear, but without making us think Costello would.
Damon is just as good. He walks a tightrope with his character and does it well giving a realistic and grounded performance even as things crumble around his character.
Nicholson, however, very nearly heists the film as Costello. He doesn't so much act as show up and play Jaaack turned up to 11. It's a massively entertainging performance in much the same way his Joker was. However it isn't all fun and games. Nicholson never lets the stone cold killer go away, ever allows us to forget that this is the man who, two minutes into the film, shoots a man in the head and observes only that 'he fell funny'.
The film could have been the Jack Nicholson show and that it's not is down not only to Damon and DiCaprio but an excellent supporting cast. There's strong contributions from Alec Baldwin and Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg has his best role in years but it is Vera Farmiga who is the revelation here.
A the police psychiatrist who get close to both Damon and DiCaprio she has pretty limited screen time but still creates a three dimensional woman that you'll care about and feel for as she gets embroiled in a situation she knows nothing about.
Scorsese brings his A game to the table. The film is shot through with his customary style but this never feels like smeone resting on his laurels or doing what he's done before. It looks stunning. The narrative is powered forward with a series of tense set pieces which can stand comparison with Marty's best work. Collaborating yet again with editor Thelma Schoonmaker also helps as she's about the best in the business.
The violence of The Departed is swift and brutal and often unexpexted, that's perhaps what is best about the film, even when you think you know where it's going it fakes you out and does something much more interesting.
The Departed won't, and shouldn't, be mentioned in the same breath as classics like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull but it is a great film and it is wonderful to see that, into his sixties, Scorsese can still deliver the goods so impressively

I've seen a great variety of films in my recent exploration of South Korean cinema. From police procedurals, to horror films to romantic dramas. My Sassy Girl is my first venture into the romantic comedy genre, one I don't often get on well with in English. However MSG has been so well recieved and so influential in Korea that I felt almost bound to have a look at it.
The film is narrated by Gyun-woo (Cha) a 25 year old student who remenisces about the titular girl (Jeon). They meet on a train, she's drunk and passes out so he looks after her, gets her a motel room but is mistakenly arrested. This, of course, is only the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
The girl (never named) seems to take her greatest delight in humiliating Gyun-woo, she tells him what to order, instigates games where her prize for winning is to be allowed to slap him and makes him swap shoes with her when her high heels hurt her feet. However it slowly becomes clear that there is a growing mutual affection and attraction, at which point she suggests they each write a letter about their feelings, bury it in a time capsule and not see each other for two years, when they will open it.
There's a lot of plot there because this is an event packed marathon of a film. It's overlong at 137 minutes but you'll certainly never be bored.
What keeps interest levels consistently high are winning performances from Cha and Jeon, both newcomers. Jeon's character is, for the first half of the film, completely unsympathetic, she seems to exist only to abuse Gyun-woo but I suspect that a second viewing, with the evolution she undergoes in the film's second half in mind, will address some of the discomfort of sepending so much time with someone so unsympathetic. It's in the second half that Jeon excels when the script becomes more of a romance and she's allowed to broaden the character. Give her credit though, she throws herself into the whole of the role with such gusto that it allows you to go with the character from the off, and to laugh when she's doing some pretty nasty things.
Cha, too, gives 110 percent. He's somewhat remeniscent of the clueless protagonists of American Pie, a likeable and identifiable character and he's three dimensional from the start (obviously his voiceover is a great help in this).
The first half of the film (which is divided into three; First half, second half aand overtime) is the most broadly comic. There's a lot of slapstick humour, including a particularly funny moment during a game played on a subway train and some unnessecary gross out jokes but perhaps the biggest laughs come from parody sequences triggered by movie treatments the girl writes. These allow Kwak and his crew to parody Hong-Kong action films (notably Wong Kar-wai's wuxia Ashes of Time)in focused and highly amusing fashion, as well as prviding a couple of jokes for people with some foreknowledge of Korean cinema.
It's the second half where the film really gets going though combining laughs and emotion deftly. Best are excellent sequences set to The Temptations' wonderful 'My Girl' (now reclaimed for me from that crappy movie) and a touching use of Pachabel's Canon.
My Sassy Girl never goes quite where you think it will and this is sustained right up until the final moments which end the movie on just the right note and one of its bigger laughs.
It may take a long while to get going but My Sassy Girl is a film well worth sticking with. You'll laugh, you may cry, you'll certainly care where the characters end up and how. I can see myself grading it higher on a second watch but for now My Sassy Girl gets 3 stars.

Kinda fun while it lasts, forgettable the instant it finishes.

Borat is an extended version of the three to five minute sketches Sacha Baron Cohen wrote for the Ali G show. It's not a format that often translates well to a movie, how do you stretch an idea that has previously only worked over five minutes to 90? Well if you believe the reviews Baron Cohen has cracked it, Borat has been hailed as one of the funniest films of the year, of all time even. Sometimes I wonder if I see the same films as everyone else.
To be fair it starts well. Borat's tour of his hometown is pretty funny and has some of the best asides in the movie ('Naughty, naughty').
Then, after this breif setup, off to the US we go. It's here the film stops working as well. Baron Cohen's comedy hinges on exposing real people to Borat and a lot of these bits are fine but once in America the scripted bits fall very flat indeed.
A movie needs a plot, so Borat falls in love with Pamela Anderson so we can have a road movie structure. However this structure just leads to much of the film feeling contrived. Hey, Borat's really anti-semitic, lets have him stay in a B and B run by a Jewish couple (yes, I know Baron Cohen is Jewish, that doesn't make this sequence less uncomfortable, or funny).
Too much of the comedy is too easy, too baiting. Guess what, when you break things in someone's antique store they get upset, there's a knee slapper. Oh, by the way, don't present your shit in a bag at dinner, apparently that's a no no.
Occasionally, just occasionnaly, Baron Cohen nails some people who really deserve it; a hideously racist rodeo owner, a gun store owner who doesn't bat an eyelid when asked which gun is best for killing jews and some odious frat boys. However most of his subjects are nice well meaning people that he has to push and push and push to get the bad reaction he wants, the dinner party sequence is perhaps the best example of this. Borat dines with some society people insults them up and down before going to the bathroom. They have the patience of saints with him and the film has to resort to him getting a prostitute (in another contrived development) to come over so they'll throw him out.
I don't get it, clearly. I understand what Baron Cohen is shooting for but his satire is blunt, his targets obvious (and largely undeserving) and his film less funny than it is uncomfortable. Take the resolution of the Pamela Anderson plot. It almost certainly isn't staged, let's be frank, Pammie just isn't a good enough actress for that reaction to be anything but genuine, and that makes me angry, not amused. It's simple cruelty captured for laughs. With no character developmet to speak of, no real story, not even a goal you can root for, that's all Borat really has at the end of the day... a pointlessly cruel punchline, it saddens me that this is supposed to be the best modern comedy has to offer.

At 10 Melanie (Played as an 18 year old by Francois) is a gifted pianist. She goes to take a piano exam and is doing fine until an autograph hunter comes into the room to get a signiature from one examiner (Frot) and Melaine's performance comes to a halt. Her concentration blown she messes up on restarting an fails the exam, then promptly gives up piano.
At 18 Melanie is working for a lawyer (Greggory) when she discovers he needs an au pair for a month she asks for the job and is promptly hired. On arriving she finds that the Ariane, lawyer's wife, is the very examiner who threw her confidence years ago. Ariane and her trio are working up to a hugely important concert and Ariane needs a page turner, when she finds that Melanie can read music she enlists her as turner for the concert.

I have to be careful what I say here because anything I reveal about this film risks spoiling its twists and turns so there will be no further talk of plot.
The premise of The Page Turner hardly seems like the recipe for a taut thriller but don't let that decieve you. There may be little actually happening most of the time but this only lets Dercourt create a chilling atmosphere and play with your imaginings of the possibilities. He takes Hitchcock's maxim that the recipe for thrills is to give the audience more knowledge than the characters and certainly the fact that you know who Melanie is while Ariane does not is a cornerstone of the film.
What takes this beyond an efficent aping of directors like Hitchcock, Chabrol and, more recently, Michael Haneke is the extraordinary cast.
Deborah Francois, just 19 years old, is a revelation. With her long blonde hair, penetrating eyes and cut glass beauty her look is tailor made for a Hitchcock film but it's her acting that impresses most. She gives a beautifully subtle performance which will have you pondering throughout the film, and perhaps beyond the closing credits, what the character's true feelings are and how much of what transpires was planned.
Francois is matched by an excellent Catherine Frot, giving a restrained performance in a role that could easily have slipped into histrionics. Pascal Greggory, though a little sidelined by the plot, is also strong.
Dercourt sets a stately pace but tempers it with the odd shock. There's just one instance of violence, brief but painful (though not explcit) it will elicit gasps from any audience. By setting his film up like this Dercourt makes the whole thing hum with tension.
The Page Turner is what I love best about cinema. Every now and then something you had no expectations for (I almost went to something else instead) will sneak up on you and proceed to blow you away, this is that rare film.

Sofia (Lee) is a sex therapist who has never had an orgasm. James (Dawson) and Jamie (De Boy) are a gay couple who are thinking of bringing someone else into their relationship. Severin (Beamish) is a dominatrix who wants to be able to be more intimate with people. All these people, and more, explore their sexual issues through the Shortbus parties thrown by Justin Bond (Himself). The last few years have seen real sex come into mainstream cinema in a big way. Films like Intimacy, Baise Moi and Nine Songs have all featured lots of hardcore sex alongside (somewhat) mainstream stories. Now here comes Shortbus, hyped as the most explicit film the BBFC has ever passed at 18 and laden with positive reviews, the most memorable of which described it as 70's porn, as shot by Woody Allen. The story and the characters (developed by Mitchell and the cast over two years in a Mike Leigh on viagra style) work really well. These are real people, interesting people, that you'll care about. The acting is teriffic. Sook-yin Lee stands out as Sofia as does Paul Dawson as James but the film is almost stolen by Lindsay Beamish's sad dominatrix with the absolutely hillarious name (it's worth seeing the film just to hear her reaal name). The script fizzes with humour, particularly in the Shortbus party scenes ('It's like the 60's but without the hope') but then once in a while the film takes a twist and ends up wringing real emotion from you. The film also looks lovely, an CG animated version of New York, used to introduce us to the space and characters is particularly outstanding and the whole thing feels more cinematic than something like Baise Moi or Nine Songs. However there's a large downside. I'm not a prude, I have no problem with real sex in cinema but for all Mitchell's saying that the sex in Shortbus serves the story...IS the story... it actually only ever takes away from the film. I understand that the sex is an important part of the film; a large part of it is about Sofia's quest for an orgasm (and ends in, if you'll pardon the pun, rather an anti-climax) but there's no reason for it to be hardcore at all. Indeed of all the films that have used hardcore sex recently this is the one where it feels most gratuitous, perhaps because at the heart of Shortbus is a sweet funny story about several people trying to find themselves in various ways. Done with just a little more subtlety, even if the certificate were still 18, this film could have found a broader audience. Including a gay threesome which culminates in one man singing the star spangled banner into another's arse rather precludes that and that's a shame. When it is character comedy Shortbus is excellent but by trying to push the envelope John Cameron Mitchell has shot himself and his film in the foot.