First Time Viewings: 2007

As completely hollow distractions go... that's a REALLY good one.

As ultra-violent jungle movies go... this one's no Cannibal Holocaust. Make of that what you will.

The best romantic comedy to come along in a long time. James McAvoy is excellent as the lead. He manages to be awkward but also hugely charming. He's got the physicality down to pull off the slapstick nisely but is also able to be convincingly intelligent enough to deliver the more literate jokes.
McAvoy is a star but he's surrounded with some very fine support. Benedict Cumberbatch is a joy as the stuck up captain of his University Challenge team.
The love triangle is filled out by Alice Eve as McAvoy's blonde, buxom, teammate he falls in love with and Rebecca Hall as the political activist student he becomes friends with.
I've seen a film before, so I knew where this one was going from the outseet, however it's played with real charm and conviction, particularly by McAvoy and the radiant Hall. The jokes are all pretty funny and the romance, while obvious, is heart warming enough.
It's not Say Anything, but it has moments when it comes close to that sort of mastery of the genre and that's something all too rare.

I'm really really nervous about this. The good will generated by Shaun of the Dead, the inspired rom-zom-com which marked the feature film debut of the team behind Hot Fuzz, is so great and the advance word on this film so glowing that I'm worried about saying what I have to say about Hot Fuzz. Here goes anyway... It's not very good.
Now clearly for some readers I'm already burning in movie geek hell for that comment, so let's see if I can't convince the rest of you to send me there too.
Hot Fuzz is a mess. The real joy of Shaun of the Dead, for me, was how deftly it mixed its genres , so much so that it felt lie it really was making a new one. That feeling is missing here. The best moments of Fuzz are in the first half-hour when it's a curious little comedy about a big city cop in a small village but after that it becomes first a cross between a slasher and a mystery (the slasher executed with some strong gore effects and far more gusto than the mystery) and finally an action choked parody of all the cop films co-writers Wright and Pegg love. This wouldn't be so bad in and of itself, except that the changes of gear clunk badly.
Pegg and Frost certainly have chemistry on screen but both are rather hamstrung here. Pegg has written himself a dull character with few good jokes who I never really warmed up to and Frost, while much better, has to act through a grating sing song west-country accent. There's a glut of talent in the supporting cast but the've little to do. Olivia Coleman simply trots out jokes that were old when you first read them on saucy postcards years ago, Paddy Considine and Rafe Spall threaten to be fun as two of Pegg's rival detectives but they really only have one note, and they just keep on playing it.
Wright hasn't really advanced as a Director. Hot Fuzz is shot through with the same style as Shaun, and indeed TV series Spaced, particularly in the editing. The big let down on the direction side is the action. Wright has an eye for a memorable death (the church spire, both times) but he's less skillful in getting his characters to that image. Lets simply say that the shootouts won't be giving John Woo (even in his current form) any sleepless nights.
There are good jokes to be found here, however you've seen the trailer and that means you've seen most of them. For most of the rest of the two hours the film runs it treads water. There's the odd chuckle, sometimes a nice nod to the film fans in the audience (forget it Nicholas, it's Sandford) and one or two belly laughs (kung-fu kicking an old lady in the face will never not be funny) but is that really enough? For me, no, three jokes I didn't get in the trailer isn't good enough reason to sit through a two hour film, and nor should it be for you.

How do you follow a classic? That's been the problem of every film to feature Hannibal Lecter since The Silence of the Lambs. Critically the various answers have been recieved sniffily and so it was little surprise to see Hannibal Rising, book and film, greeted with a critical drubbing.
Lets say this right off the bat. It's nothing like as good as Silence. That's okay though, very very few things are. Hannibal Rising is also not remotely as bad as you've heard.
Gaspard Uliell made an impression on me with a sweet, sensetive turn as Audrey Tautou's long lost intended in A Very Long Engagement and again as Emmanuelle Beart's young lover in Strayed, it's clear that behind those classical good looks lurks a strong actor. Here, in his first English language role, Uliell's results are mixed. For the first couple of acts he's excellent. He may not look like Anthony Hopkins but much of his manner does recall that incarnation of Lecter. He slips a bit in the third act but this is the fault of the film, which becomes much more overblown and the performance inflates to keep up.
Also good is Gong Li, she's finally made some strides in speaking English and acting all at once and turns in a nicely creepy performance before credibly shifting a bit in act three. If there's a problem for her it is her looks. 41 years old she may be but so spectacularly beautiful and youthful does she look that it's hard to see her as Hannibal's aunt.
There's nobody here to root for, and that's a problem. Usualy we'd be pulling for Hannibal but even here he's so shockingly vile (to say nothing of what we know of his future escapades) that that's impossible and the bad guys are Nazis who ate someone, so clearly we're not hoping they pull through. However it's never dull. The story moves along at a good clip and Director Webber, while not bringing much that's new to the table, has certainly made a good looking film.
This is by no means a great film but it's a solid bit of entertainment and that's perfectly alright.

The Straight Story is an apt title for this, easily David Lynch's most straightforward, accessible film. It's not entirely without Lynchian moments (several characters seem ripped from his olde book of oddballs). Most of the time it feels more like a film by Terence Malick. Lynch has fallen in love with small town America here, his take on his characters is affectionate and his lensing of the countryside is beautiful.
As lovely as it looks this film centres around and owes most of its success to the performance of Richard Farnsworth. The former stuntman got an Oscar nomination for his turn and it was richly deserved. He makes Alvin a decent, if prickly, man and brings great poigniance to Alvin's disability and to his journey. Also excellent is Spacek, a great actress who brings colour to a small role and there's an effective cast of cameos as Alvin makes his trip.
It's a very gentle film, not one for a viewer who likes things to explode as often as possible, but it is relentlessly charming and well worth watching.

I never read Ghost Rider, so I've no idea if the comic book was this bad but, oh boy, does the movie suck. It's camp as a row of tents, everything turned up to 11, particularly Cage's wretched performance which is so wildly OTT you wonder if this supposed to be parodic. In fact most of the performances are shockingly poor. Eva Mendes and Peter Fonda compete for the title of 'most bored actor', Fonda takes the honours by a hair, but both act as though they are looking forward to getting back to writing that all important shopping list. As we continue the journey down to the most hellishly terrible piece of acting here we reach Wes Bentley. A charisma free zone he may as well be reading cue-cards and, as a villain, is less threatening than one of the aliens from Plan 9.
The sole bright spot, performance wise, is Sam Elliott, whose lazy drawl is brilliantly suited to his role as the source of exposition... sorry... the gravedigger that Cage befriends.
The overwhelming tedium is broken briefly by the appearence of Ghost Rider himself, certainly he's kind of cool and the effects used to bring him to life are strong but there's nothing interesting about him as a character and we never care if he wins the final battle because Blackheart is so clearly a drip that there's no threat. It's got a few cool moments though, so it is at least better than Fantastic Four.

INLAND EMPIRE (Lynch insists the title is written in capitals) is the most Lynchian film ever made, by comparison Wild At Heart and Lost Highway can stand as textbook examples of straightforward A to B narrative style and the work of a sane mind. INLAND EMPIRE is like watching the acid flashbacks of a severly troubled and increasingly addled mind. The first 15 minutes will probably alienate most of any audience. Human sized rabbits (one voiced by Naomi Watts) have existential conversations, styled as a sitcom complete with a laugh track. A hooker sits in a room watching this on TV. People talk about entirely random things in Russian. This, of course, is all before what passes for the story even arrives.
It's when the story gets going that what will keep you in your seat for the next 3 hours becomes clear; it's Laura Dern. Dern's career never really took off in the way it should have and she's still quite an unknown talent, reuniting with Lynch for the first time in 17 years since Wild At Heart she's absolutely extraordinary. She puts her trust totally in Lynch letting him film her almost entirely in tight and often unflattering close up. It's not entirely clear how many people Dern plays, but I'd say three characters would constitute a conservative estimate. Each is brilliantly defined and alive and utterly distinct from the rest. Dern's performance is one that could be used as a masterclass in film acting. She gets extraordinary mileage from doing nothing but is also spectacular when, late in the film, she has several long speeches. One, an account of how the character attacked a man who attempted to rape her is as brilliant piece of acting as I've ever seen and ends with a searing piece of dialogue which will rattle around your mind for days When the police came and they asked what happened, I told them "He's reaping what he's been sowing, that's what." They said "Fucker been sowing some pretty heavy shit." . Dern dominates the film and whenever she's off camera she is sorely missed but that's not to say there's not more of quality here. Jeremy Irons does a credible film director and Harry Dean Stanton is compellingly odd as his assistant while Justin Theroux, returning to Lynch from Mulholland Drive makes for a strong male lead.
Lynch's bizarre imagination conjures much oddness. Most barking is a moment when a group of women suddenly do a dance routine to The Locomotion (a point at which I burst out laughing, so unexpected was this) but he can also unnerve (projecting Dern's massively distorted face onto another character towards the end gets a jump).
At three hours it does drag, particularly in that opening 15 minutes (though that leads, at the end, to a moment so sublimely joyful that it could never be cut) and right at the end whne, just as the drama is reaching it's apex we are 'treated' to a bizzare, heavily accented monologue from a character we've never seen before.
At the end of the day if you can go with INLAND EMPIRE, accept it on its own obscure terms then you are likely to love it, if not you'll hate it but you should see it purely for Laura Dern's blisteringly brilliant performance.

It is a frequently made observation that roles for women can be desperately limited, if not in number then in scope. That being the case the part of the eponymous Rose must have been a tremendous gift for Laura Dern. She siezes it with both hands and gives this complex character real ife. Dern's Rose is a character of tremendous charm and subtle shadings; Rose may be simple but Dern is careful never to make her stupid. The performance garnered an Oscar nomination (in the frankly outstanding year in which Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon were up for Thelma and Louise and Jodies Foster won for Silence of the Lambs) but it is hardly the sole attraction of this very fine film.
Robert Duvall is his dependably excellent self as Daddy and it is to his credit that he finds the balance in his character, who could have come off as an ogre, and makes us like and respect him. Also Oscar nominated was Diane Ladd as Mother and she gives a performance of great strength and dignity, vital in the last act of the film.
Then 14 Lukas Haas again shows that he was one of a very few child actors who aren't monumentally annoying. His strong performance may be down to a real understanding of being a hormonal teenager or it may simply be that he WAS a hormonal teenager, but it works and he's a fine partner for Dern in their scenes together.
Martha Coolidge strikes a fine balance between the more sexual elements of the story and the sweetness of the tone of the film, never more so than in the film's outstanding scene where Rose asks if she can get in bed with Buddy and he uses this oppurtunity to get her to let him explore her body. This could be deeply unsavoury but the dialogue takes that out of it, making it about a curious boy and a desperate, confused girl and it ends up being a sweet scene in spite of itself.
The film also tiptoes between comedy and drama, but it's strongest when mixing the two, as with Dern's lovely line about being "Only a human girl person".
An excellent character piece, with terrific performances from all concerned, Rambling Rose is the kind of movie that they just don't make enough of.

October Sky is something of a throwback, a film that seems to have come from ore innocent times. The sense of period it conjures runs not just through the story and imagery but the feeling of the film itself. The timeline may be compressed and juggled but the basic facts of this story are true.
The story of the rocket boys is really only half of the film, Johnston also manages to paint an affectionate and affecting portrait of a town on its last legs.
A pre Donnie Darko Gyllenhaal is excellent as Homer. He coveys his desperation to get out of a life in the mies by any means well but also gives a convincing portrait of a young man whose imagination is fired by Sputnik and all the possibilities it holds. Also excellent is Chris Cooper, who does another in his line of gruff fathers; John Hickham is something of a PG rated Colnel Fitts. The scene that he and Gyllenhaal share are among the film?s most effective.
The other young actors playing the rocket boys are also good, particularly Chris Owen, who really does deserve better than a future playing variations on the Shermanator. Best among the supporting cast though is Laura Dern, a luminous presence in far too few scenes, she wrings tears from you in her last couple but it doesn?t feel manipulative, you like Miss Riley, so those tears are earned.
Joe Johnston has never been much more than a journeyman director and thee big flaw in the film is that does lack a real identifiable directorial voice, there?s little flourish here.
Overall though this is a fine film, and you just try and hold in the cheers at the end.