Square Pegg

Nobody has a good word to say about Toby Young, including Toby Young. In his memoir of a failed career as a New York society writer, How To Lose Friends And Alienate People, he boasts of his “negative charisma”, the same bad vibrations that reportedly drove Robert Weide to remove him from the set of this film adaptation when he began to offer the director notes on the actors performances. Since his book was published in 2002, Young has made his name as a writer by chronicling his own inadequacies. By his own admission he has no shortage of material to work with but the same is not true of the film, which starts in a muddle and quickly exhausts itself.

We first meet Sidney Young (Simon Pegg) as he struggles to publish another issue of his London based satirical magazine. His desperate attempts to make a success of his hip but penniless London magazine have somehow come to the attention of Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges), the floppy haired editor of New York’s prestigious Sharp’s magazine (all the names have been changed to protect the guilty, but Bridges is essentially a lawyer-friendly clone of Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter).

Badly dressed and bathed in a panicked sweat, Sidney is quickly brought up to speed on life in the Big Apple. Only a chosen few will rise above the herd so if Sidney wants into what Harding calls “the seventh room”, he’d better learn to pucker up. His only friend on the magazine is the clued-in Allison (a disappointingly remote Kirsten Dunst) who claims she hates him and is only marking time before finishing her novel. Sidney is too infatuated with beautiful but dim actress Sophie Maes (Megan Fox, playing herself essentially) to notice.

A fish out of water, Sidney duly flops about on deck in a series of dim-witted set-ups spiked with celebrity cameos and media-friendly references. The story proper starts when Sidney learns the secret to success is access so cosies up to all-powerful publicist Eleanor Johnson (Gillian Anderson). A photo by-line, a Park Avenue apartment, an open invitation to celebrity parties and a swanky watch all arrive in quick succession. You don’t need to have seen The Apartment, The Sweet Smell Of Success or it’s imitators like The Devil Wears Prada, to know that Sidney will eventually come to realise that his toadying has cost him his integrity.

Struggling writers have been the jumping off point for countless comedies, from Adaptation to Barton Fink, but HTWFAAP simply isn’t smart enough to tackle the theme, taking instead the easy route of lengthy montage, eye-rolling slapstick and some derivative nonsense with a Chihuahua. It is all tinged with a snide sense of injustice and a curious reverse snobbery, some of which manages to be faintly amusing, but the remainder decidedly less so.

Pegg has proven himself to be a nimble comic presence, using his mobile, expressive face to fill the frame with gurning despair or wrinkle-nosed self-loathing. Underneath the buffoonery, there is a performance but Sydney is so obnoxious, even in the scenes where we are supposed to like him that Pegg fails to win us over. This inability to connect with our odious anti-hero, or to feel anything for his inevitable conversion, is the film’s most significant flaw but it is not the only one.

Director Robert Waide, whose resume includes episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, has form when it comes to unlikeable, spiky characters but his treatment of the material here is anonymous and lumpy. He pushes the one-directional story along at a fair clip but Peter Straughan’s script gets too distracted along the way. Allison’s covert romance with the pompous sub-editor Lawrence Maddox (Danny Huston) is hastily established and even more quickly resolved. Neither actor can do anything with it. Sideshows from Miriam Margolyes as the elaborately moustachioed Eastern European landlady and Bill Patterson as Sidney’s estranged intellectual father are abandoned once they deposit their narrative burdens. The greatest waste is Bridges, presented with a few illuminating moments as the taciturn mentor but inelegantly squashed into the remainder of the story.

Read my interview with Pegg and compadre Nick Frost for Hot Fuzz here

Harry Shearer & For Your Consideration

To mark the release of Harry Shearer's new album, Songs Of The Bushmen, I'm posting an interview I did with him around the release of For Your Consideration, in 2006, where he talks about the process of being funny, the state of America and the future of celebrity.

“Ho-ho and bejabbers” says Harry Shearer in a terrible Oirish accent as his PR minder smoothly introduces me. Surely that’s not your best effort I reply, in a neutral tone, as the man of a thousand voices explains the double reference in his greeting: he’s doing Steve Coogan doing Alan Partridge doing Irish, “in that scene with the visiting TV producers in the restaurant, remember? I love Alan Partridge, he’s so…clueless.”

When not momentarily confusing visiting journalists, regardless of nationality, Harry Shearer wears a lot of hats, mostly in disguise. As an actor, he is probably best known for his long collaboration with Christopher Guest on the series of hilarious mockumentaries that started with Rob Reiner’s Spinal Tap back in the 1980s and continued with famously improvised comedies like Best in Show and A Mighty Wind. If you don’t know him from there, for more than a decade he has voiced an ensemble of the best loved characters on The Simpsons; Monty Burns, Principal Skinner and Ned Flanders among them and had finished work on the upcoming Simpsons Movie the week before. Last December he published his third comic novel, ‘Not Enough Indians’ while keeping busy by releasing albums of satirical songs, doing a weekly radio show and exhaustingly, spending most of last year on the road in a run of one-man ‘evenings with…’, including a sell-out month at the Edinburgh Fringe. Despite the workload, he looks chipper enough today, painstakingly neat like all American actors bar the teenagers, resplendent in a vivid purple shirt and black dress pants with razorblade seams.

For a certain constituency of moviegoer, the opening of a new film from writer/director Guest and his collective of comic performers, is cause to dust down their happy faces and bulwark their sides against an imminent splitting. They arrive every four years or so and feature, for the most part, identical casts but they never seem to repeat themselves. So how does it come about? “Well, Chris will initiate something discreetly so once we all get wind of that, we sit by the phone waiting for the call to say “you’re in!”. I’m friendly with Chris outside of the work and he’d been saying after Mighty Wind that he didn’t want to do any more of that specific type of movie. So that was that, we thought, and we all went away to do our own thing. That lasted about three months, then I get the call - I have an idea - then six months - well I’m kind of still looking at it – and then it’s like – what are you doing in February?”

The movie’s title, For Your Consideration is taken from the strap line of the attention-hustling print advertisements for the Academy Award nominees that clog the US trade magazines around this time of the year. It is something of a departure from Guest’s trademark mockumentary format, being at least partially scripted. “About half of it was all there beforehand.” In it, Shearer plays Victor Allen Miller, a middle-aged actor best known for portraying a six-foot hot-dog in a series of adverts on the telly. In the film-within-a-film a grateful Victor is playing the concerned father in a low-budget production, a preposterous Jewish melodrama set in the Deep South in the 1940s called Home for Purim. Opposite Victor is the similarly faded Marilyn Hack (Catherine O'Hara), playing Ester, the ailing wife and mother to Callie (Parker Posey) who has returned home for the titular Jewish holiday after a long estrangement. What we see of the film is a procession of hilarious Oy-Vey! yiddisher clichés, directed by Guest himself as a wire-haired buffoon. The real story is happening off set where thanks to some buzz on a movie website, the rumour starts that the three ‘stars’ might be in the running for an Oscar nomination. The three suddenly star-struck nobodies are surrounded by a typically deranged army of Guest’s usual performers, familiar faces that, endearingly and almost uniquely, are a genuine pleasure to see together again. Fred Willard and Jane Lynch play a duo of Hollywood gossip show hosts. Bob Balaban and Michael McKean play Purim’s railroaded writers. John Michael Higgins plays an exciteable publicist while the blank-faced Jennifer Coolidge plays a dense producer. The most notable newcomer to the ensemble is Ricky Gervias, playing and interfering studio executive, as keen as the cast are to ride the coattails of the Oscar possibilities.

Although comics will tell you that being funny is the hardest thing in the world to do, the impression from the outside is that the cast reunite, put on the togs and start cracking jokes, while later Guest trims it down to into a manageable movie. “No, it’s not like that at all”, says Shearer. “We don’t crack jokes. We’re really not cracking jokes. As a group, we’re not deadpan serious, obviously, but the first job is to tell the story that Chris has outlined in his notes and be that character. So if it’s a scene with Victor and his agent (Eugene Levy, co-writer and constant presence), I think the scene is pathetic enough without having to lard it up.” I ask him if, in the ensemble, there’s ever any argument when it comes to deciding who plays who? “No, no, we’re very civilized. Anyway, both Chris and Gene have a clear idea at the outset of who is going to play who. The fighting comes over deciding the look of your character. I get to the makeup room on the first day of shooting and might be thinking about something in a moustache, say and they’re like, no, sorry, McKean has a moustache. What about a beard? Funny teeth? So, literally, that is what we fight over. We’re the kind of actors who work on our characters from the outside in – we need to know what they’re going to look like from the outset.” Is that the secret, goofy teeth? “Well, it helps if we make each other laugh, right? Chris is operating with the luxury of time and in the assumption of trust; that if you get these people together funny stuff will happen and he will be able to find it. But the job description is really just an acting job. Yes, we’re all trying to make our characters into funny characters, but just to play that guy or girl as much as you can and try to get into their skin, and add to it the little you know about yourself or other people.”

Everything we know as being bad about Hollywood and the business of stardom gets a skewering in Consideration. Shearer, who was a child actor, has been around the place for a long time so I ask him what the dumbest thing anyone ever said to him within the precincts of LA. He thinks about his answer for a moment and grimaces slightly as he leans forward. “I was in a movie called The Truman Show and in the lead up to the release this American magazine asked me to do a diary about working on the picture. So, I did that, carefully writing up my thoughts, and the first line was ‘Even though this movie stars Jim Carrey, I never laid eyes on him during filming. So this diary is not about Jim Carrey’. Now, that was simply stating a fact, because we didn’t have any scenes together but the magazine chose to title the piece The Trouble With Carrey.” He spreads out his arms to marquee the headline, emphasising it word by word and sighs. “The day it came out, I get a call from the producer, who shall remain nameless, to say that I was disinvited – is that a word - to the premiere. I was persona non grata on the whole publicity tour. So I said that I didn’t write the headline personally, or edit the piece, but if he was to actually go and read beyond the first paragraph, it was very complimentary and very positive about the movie and so on. He hangs up. The next day, word comes back. ‘If you show up at the premiere, the entire event will be cancelled on the spot’.” He pauses for effect. “I stood there, phone in hand, for a full five minutes thinking “I’m going to do it! Where’s my tux?” But I like Peter Weir and the rest of the cast, and I had a great time making the movie, so why would I want to ruin their evening? But that, the ravings of a five-year-old, temper-throwing moron who just happens to be a very powerful person in the motion picture business, is about the dumbest and weirdest thing that’s ever been said to me.”

Victor, a dummy adrift in a sea of idiots, goes to some weird and infantile places over the course of his momentary fame, pulling on a tight, shiny t-shirt, spiking his hair and bleaching his teeth and acquiring a startling oxo-cube tan. He even dances on MTV’s TRL, bumping and grinding with two teenage girls. Shearer insists that although he knew Victor would “get a dose of the same disease, the madness that grips Marilyn”, he didn’t realise it would involve completely reinventing himself into what he calls ‘Victor II’. “You see, this is one of the ironies of this situation, that at the very moment they get the attention they believe they deserve, they want to be a new, improved version of themselves. It speaks to that big hole in the centre here, the actor’s idea that they really deserve this recognition but they’re simply not good enough at the same time. Victor feels the need to be prettier, younger, nicer, thinner, hipper, and all of the above and more.”

Has he thought about the part that the interview process, the same publicity machine that they nail in the movie and part of which involves somebody like me being hustled into a hotel room to ask a few barely probing questions? “Well, first of all, it’s not somebody like you, it’s the actual you. I think the cast were all thinking about that, the kind of mirror game we’re playing here. It started for me when we were in Toronto at the Film Festival and I was walking out of the hotel to get a cup of coffee and I met these two guys, just regular festival goers not industry people. They offered to buy me a cup of coffee and one of them says, completely straight-faced, ‘so Harry, what’s the buzz on your movie?’ I said to myself, isn’t that what Consideration is about. It’s a hall of mirrors.” Shearer admits that while making the film, the cast talked about how they were going to face the press and the publicity with a straight face. “First of all, there is this cacophonous media environment where companies spend zillions of dollars to bludgeon you with news of their new product. We’re trying to get just the tiniest scrap of the public attention and say, this movie might interest you. You might have a good time watching this. What we’re doing here, it’s all about that and you know, what we’re making fun of in the movie more than anything else is that note of desperation that can creep in. Please notice me, love me!”

In the movie, there’s the sense for the actors that finally, after this long process of humiliation there might come a moment of esteem? “Well it’s that or just relief from the humiliation.” He laughs. “Which would be just as good, believe me.” “It’s not about flattery, though”, he continues, “with the cast of Home for Purim, these people always been third-tier talents and when you’re anywhere but at the absolute top in this business, humiliation is a constant. You’re either experiencing it, or you’re just over it or it’s coming around the corner. It’s the actor’s constant fear. So any salve you can apply to that is the Holy Grail.” The ultimate salve, the most soothing ego-balm for any actor, is the Oscars. I ask Shearer if he's a member of the academy. “Nope”, he says. Has he ever been asked to join? “Er, well, Ed Begley said you need two people to nominate you for your body of work, which is a curious phrase, and something happened over the years that turned into nothing, but I don’t really care. My wife (singer Judith Owen) is in the BAFTA, so we get the screener DVDs and isn’t that the only real benefit?”

After admitting that he’s recently been busy enough to justify employing a publicist for the first time, I ask Shearer what he thinks about awards show season, which now runs from December to the Oscars in March. “There are way, way too many of them, no question about it. But there are too many awards generally. I’ve been making a little collection of awards shows from outside of the entertainment industry, the strangest little corners of American commerce and effort. Really, I get sent videos. I have ones from ‘The Oscars of Funeral Directors’ or ‘The Oscars of People who make PR Videos about Funeral Directors’.” I laugh at his joke, partly because he delivers it in pure Kent Brockman, before he stops me. “No, really, it goes on and on and on. They’ve all watched the real Oscars, and have learned about walking to the podium and doing their acceptance speech and not talking too long in case the music drowns you out. Doesn’t anybody just do a job anymore? Is there a back left unpatted in America? The great American humourist Jean Shepherd once said ‘Eventually, Everything Will Become Showbusiness’. At the time, it seemed like a daffy thing to say but now it’s absolutely true.”

Redbelt & Taken

Twinned curiosities this week, with David Mamet, American cinema’s snarling id, bringing us his jiu-jitsu Rocky and Liam Neeson laying waste to all around him in a politically whiffy French kidnap drama? What next – Anthony Hopkins pointing a glowing finger in E.T. II: Elliot’s Revenge? Cameron Diaz outing vile spots in Judd Apatow’s Macbeth?

Redbelt, titled after the highest grade of expertise in the sport, a cross between judo and wrestling, is essentially a chopsocky drama. This description that might seem like a departure for the heavyweight writer and director, but Mamet always twisted genre archetypes to suit his own ends. Different tales told in a distinctive voice, his films share the same blank tone, unmistakable staccato dialogue, deftly pleated storylines and an uncommon throb of excess testosterone.

Redbelt is a Mamet from the opening frames, an experiment in channelling the zen of Bruce Lee through the conduit of Jean Luc Godard’s infamous dictum that “all you need for a movie is a girl and a gun”. The girl is Laura (Emily Mortimer), the gun belongs to LA policeman Joe (played by Max Martini), who leaves it lying on a bench in a failing martial arts studio run by Mike (Chiwetel Ejiofor). High-flying lawyer Laura is jonesing for her anti-anxiety medication and in an excited moment grabs the pistol. It goes off, setting in a motion a series of unlikely events that will change Mike’s life dramatically and test the patience of even the most serene viewer.

Mike isn't just a teacher, he's a guru, an aesthetic monk who follows a strict code of honour in life and in combat. Even though he is broke, a fact wife Sondra (Alice Braga) reminds him of daily, Mike refuses to enter fighting competitions, believing they corrupt and demean his sport. In a rush of developments, Mike saves movie star Chet Frank (Tim Allen) from a beating in a bar and is invited to dinner by way of thanks. There he meets Chet’s sleazy manager (Joe Mantegna) who brings him on board the film and gifts him an expensive watch. Life, for once, looks good for Mike and Sondra, who makes an important business connection with Chet’s wife (played by Mamet’s wife, Rebecca Pidgeon).

Mike the warrior philosopher is the typical Mamet hero, a throwback to a time of honour and values. In the developing scam, Mike is the patsy, the mark, and like the best of his kind, he is oblivious to his status. He makes the mistake in thinking that everybody is like him, honest and sincere. The story, based in part on Mamet’s own experiences as a jiu-jitsu student, soon becomes needlessly, wilfully complicated but Ejiofor has reserves of stoic serenity to play with, a calm charisma that maintains our interest in the early part of the story. It doesn’t hold, partly because Mike remains a character without a story of his own, a collection of ideas and surface indicators. It’s to Ejiofor’s credit that he remains as watchable as he does for as long as he does.

Redbelt might appear tough but Mamet pulls too many of his punches, unable to communicate Mike’s impotent rage with the same verve he brings to the spitfire dialogue and bewildering disclosures. These elements are what make the film uniquely Mamet, but are also what suffocate it in familiarity. His intellectual machismo has become cliché, his determination to befuddle a narrative tic, even the secondary cast is assembled from the writer and director’s stock company of actors. These familiar faces spout beautifully poised epithets across Mamet’s recognisable spaces, affecting an unruffled, world-weary disdain as they punctuate their emphatic line readings with oddly spaced pauses.

So focused is Mamet on pulling the wool over our eyes he reduces his emotional material - a suicide in disgrace, an emotional betrayal - to throwaway lines of dialogue that bounce off Mike’s broad chest without effecting so much as a flinch. Instead we get an increasingly preposterous story about maintaining the Corinthian spirit in sport, spliced into a green ink essay on the machinations of unscrupulous movie producers.

Mamet loves these characters for their smart mouths and their balls but doesn’t seem at all interested in their souls. He revels in poking around in the background of their lives but Redbelt remains a tentative snoop around dimly lit corners, ignoring the potential in darker basements and distracted by the inexorable crawl towards the climactic fight. The problem is not the density of the drama or the preponderance of narrative blind alleys; it’s that the plot lacks all coherence and consistency. The trap Mamet springs is dependent on hastily explained (if we’re lucky) off-screen interventions and a long series of plausibility-sapping coincidences. Even after another character carefully explains the ending to him, Ejiofor looks none the wiser.

Taken, the new film from District 13 director Pierre Morel, has Liam Neeson playing a kind of middle-aged Jason Bourne, a retired CIA agent who is forced into action when his teenage daughter is kidnapped by human traffickers in Paris. All towering menace, Neeson plays single-dad Bryan Mills, who is on the phone with his 17-year-old daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), when she and her friend Amanda (Katie Cassidy) are taken from their holiday apartment by Albanian gangsters who steal unaccompanied women and sell them into slavery. Having already established the schism between Bryan and his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen), Neeson’s highly-trained killer boards her new husband’s private jet and touches down in Paris to start the search for his daughter.

Armed with little more than a briefcase full of high-tech gizmos and his own hungry fists, the infinitely resourceful Bryan races around the city, extracting vital information from the scantiest of leads while dishing out cold-blooded retribution. Having established Byran as a superman, Neeson is allowed to do some pretty extraordinary things – in effect, he can do what he likes – striding into the gang’s hideout, shooting dozens of swarthy assailants, evading the French police and the piqued Albanians while gradually getting closer to the truth of what has happened to Kim.

Director Pierre Morel has a great eye for action and an ability to maintain tension through even the most unlikely developments. Taking his cue from producer Luc Besson’s commitment to narrative momentum and Paul Greengrass’s livewire photography, Morel delivers a series of beautifully choreographed, high-octane action sequences and bruising fight scenes, in contrast to the overly expedient script, which sees scores of ‘foreigners’ fall victim to Bryan’s righteous vengeance, shot where they stand for getting in his way.

Neeson is 56 now but he remains an effective, efficient action man – he was a Jedi Knight, remember - a credible threat right from the opening scenes. Taken is trimmed back to the bone, and moves at such a blistering pace, that the Ballymena actor is only required to express wrinkle-eyed concern and flared-nostril wrath, but he does both extremely well. Around him however, the secondary cast flounder. Janssen’s role amounts to almost nothing, acting as a foil for scene-setting resentments and then dissolving into a voice on the phone. Grace, a 25 year old playing 17, is overly excited in the set-up, innocently giggling and skipping on her way to her doom before her character is reduced to a focal point for Bryan’s revenge.

Redbelt and Taken are odd, jumpy stories about absurdly driven men in dangerous surroundings fighting to retain the only thing that remains dear to them. They share a gritty sense of realism but are stiff with genre formalities and hobbled with implausibilities. In the end, the difference between the two films – why one bears the ugly brand of two-star disdain and the other gets a tentative recommendation – is a question of intent.

Taken takes action seriously, casually administering regular jolts of adrenaline that compels the viewer through the story. Redbelt has just as many opportunities to deliver thrills, but is too preoccupied with higher thoughts to properly address matters of the gut. Taken moves in an unswerving straight line at tremendous speed, Redbelt meanders distractedly before rushing its conclusions in a fumble. Redbelt thinks it is Greek Tragedy, Taken knows it is a fantasy. One aspires to have meaning, the other couldn't care less.

This post is a so-far unique two-for-one deal. A recessionary move.
I was struck by how similar and how different both films are, even though they come from completely different places.

Wave Goodbye

German director Dennis Gansel’s political allegory The Wave is based on a real event that took place in a Californian history class in 1967, when an impassioned history teacher laid down draconian new rules by way of introducing his students to fascism and was surprised to see the teenagers follow them to the letter.

Now transposed to modern-day Germany, we first meet Rainer Wegner (Jürgen Vogel), a hopelessly trendy teacher in a Ramones T-shirt and canvas satchel, as he races his car to work. Disappointment awaits - a rival teacher has taken the class on rock and roll anarchy and he must teach boring old autocracy. Stupid Hitler and all that stuff, say the kids on the first day; the jock, the hippy, the goth and the hot girl united in eye-rolling ennui. But Wenger has a trendy plan. He’ll subvert their expectations by turning the classroom into a microcosm of dictatorship, with him as the glorious leader.

Under the teacher’s charismatic instruction, the slouchy, lippy teenagers straighten up and fly right with implausible alacrity, adopting a white-shirted uniform and rediscovering personal grooming. The new class slogan, “Strength Through Discipline” has clearly struck a chord. By Wednesday, they have promulgated a floppy-armed salute, like someone describing the contours of a recumbent Sophia Loren. Thursday sees the class scrawl a graffito of flaming waves throughout the town while developing a snippy attitude towards outsiders and a not-the-brightest collective mentality, a C+ hive mind.

As the power-tripping Wenger surveys his new-build Reich, remnants of his liberal consciousness cause an eye to twitch. What Would Joey Ramone Do? Also, his wife doesn’t like it. The experiment continues apace, despite the efforts of a red-shirted dissenter (Jennifer Ulrich), who has cottoned on to ze movement’s malign momentum and made a myspace page about it. Just in time too. The kids have taken to pointing guns at punks, the point at which the already slack narrative finally loses its hold, the nub of truth worn down to didactic nudges and calculated contrivance. Friday holds little surprise.

More props than characters, the young ensemble are efficiently commanded by the veteran Vogel but are less convincing when playing soldiers amongst themselves. Although he touches off themes like teenage alienation and parental disinterest, Gansel turns an interesting premise into a grasping, over-extended trudge through the bullet points of totalitarianism. The Wave has things to say, but lacks the guile, wit and dramatic innovation to say them well.

A Memorandum Of It

Adapted from John Boyne’s bestselling 'young adult' novel, The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas tells the story of the Holocaust through the eyes of eight year old Bruno (Asa Butterfield), the son of the Nazi commander at Auschwitz, who strikes up a friendship with a Jewish boy Shmuel through the fence surrounding the camp, behind their house in the countryside.

A lonely, inquisitive child, Bruno is ignored by his career-minded father (David Thewlis), cosseted by his mother (Vera Farminga) and tormented by his teenage sister Gretel (Amber Beattie). The family have recently left Berlin to arrive at a beautiful Bauhaus manor in the country, beside what Bruno thinks is a ‘farm’. Wandering about one day, Bruno meets Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), a skinny, bald-headed boy on the other side of an electrified fence, and the two strike up a friendship. Bruno wants a companion, someone to talk to, in part to help him understand what is going on around him. Shmuel only wants something to eat.

As an attempt to humanise the inhumane, and re-frame a terrible history in a way children can understand and empathise with, Boy In The Striped Pyjamas succeeds for the most part, but Harman’s adaptation falls prey to narrative blind alleys and emotional clichés without ever losing a nagging sense of over-simplification. He frames these events as a fable, establishing Bruno and Shmuel as allegorical archetypes but cannot then ground them in their time and place – a serious flaw when the time is the Holocaust and the place is Auschwitz. It is never a good thing when a film calls to mind the unutterably trite Life Is Beautiful and while Harman’s film doesn’t go as far as making a cartoon out of unfathomable suffering, there are moments when the film’s awkward artificiality are impossible to ignore.

Still, this is an interesting treatment of an interesting story, convincingly played by the two young leads. In the third act, Bruno cheerfully initiates a game, having spied on a screening of a propaganda film, setting in train a series of dreadful events that are beautifully crafted into a deeply powerful dénouement as Harman moves from the realm of fairytales to the stuff of nightmares. Elegantly photographed and delicately poised, there is enough in the last half hour to carry the entire film.

The headline comes from a passage in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures In Wonderland: "The horror of that moment," the King went on, "I shall never, never forget!" "You will, though," the Queen said, "if you don't make a memorandum of it".

Fruit Machine Gun

There is a lot to like in Pineapple Express, a cross between Cheech & Chong and Lethal Weapon which reunites Freaks & Geeks stars Seth Rogen and James Franco as a pair of stoned idiots getting caught up in a drug war.

The curly-headed Rogen plays Dale, a habitual pot smoker, who buys his marijuana from Franco’s similarly bewildered Saul. While Saul rarely leaves his gadget-scattered apartment, Dale’s low-pressure job as a legal clerk, delivering writs to defendants, gives him plenty of time to spark up in his car between jobs. One night, half-baked, he witnesses druglord Ted Jones (Gary Cole) and his crooked-cop accomplice (Rosie Perez) murder an Asian gangster.

As it happens, the weed Dale was smoking is a rare strain known as Pineapple Express imported by Jones, who traces it back to his supplier Red (a scene-stealing Danny McBride), and then onto the boys. As Dale and Saul run for their lives, they soon discover that they’re not living out some pot-induced paranoid dream; the bad guy’s henchmen (Kevin Corrigan and Craig Robinson) really are trying to kill them.

What follows is a suitably incoherent but brilliantly observed and affectionate buddy comedy that offers plenty of laughs in the first section, but abruptly switches genre half way through to turn into a surprisingly visceral action movie which revels in showing our previously charming and befuddled heroes pick up machine guns and kill dozens of people. It’s played as a spoof, but still, it’s a jolting transition that considerably lessens the film’s giggling appeal, trailing Hot Fuzz – for instance - in wanting to be two or three movies at once and ending up split down the middle.

Nevertheless, Pineapple Express has all the elements you expect by now from Rogen: barrel-chested male bonding, adolescent sexual fantasies, endless movie references and quotable foul-mouthed dialogue all suffused in the bittersweet whiff of marijuana. Fittingly his script, the second collaboration with Evan Goldberg following last year’s Superbad, rambles, becoming incoherent and distracted, but the life-affirming central story of male friendship is closely contained.

What really distinguishes this film from the stampede of Judd Apatow productions is the poetic touch of director David Gordon Green, an indie darling for his repertoire of offbeat, tender films like George Washington and All The Real Girls. Not the obvious pick for the material, Green does bring a fresh look to the typically flat, televisual scheme of these production-line comedies, but overplays his hand markedly in the big action finale, galloping through what is expected without bringing anything particularly new.

Rock Steady

Having failed to make his wife Madonna into a movie star and likewise botched his attempts to fashion a crime caper out of the ancient Jewish Kabbalah, mock-cockney chancer Guy Ritchie goes back to his roots for the surprisingly effective and determinedly entertaining Rocknrolla.

Opening with a flashy montage of the cast and a typically pounding juke-box soundtrack, Rocknrolla centres on…well, that’s the thing. Working from his own convoluted script, as he did in Lock, Stock... and Snatch, Richie once again creates a sprawling, character-heavy world where geezers and hoodlums rub shoulders with celebrity and high society, a legion of movers and shakers who wind their way through the story while at the same time becoming embroiled in the main plot, by accident or design.

As far as I can make out, that main plot involved a pair of wise-cracking London gangsters, One Two (Gerard Butler) and Mumbles (Idris Elba), who become involved in a land deal with the dangerous Lenny Cole (Tom Wilkinson) that goes belly up. The pair, given an extremely short due date for the debt, are serendipitously recruited by crooked accountant Stella (Thandie Newton), to steal a bag full of money from her Russian oligarch paymaster Uri (Karel Roden). Into this already meaty soup, Richie throws a missing painting (which we never see), a missing-presumed-dead rock star Johnny Quid (Toby Kebbell) and an out-of-their-depth pair of American music producers (played by Jeremy Piven and the rapper Ludacris). Acting as a guide, in voiceover, is Lenny’s right hand man Archie (an excellent Mark Strong), who discovers a dark secret about his boss that will test his loyalty.

Although too easily distracted and belaboured with some clunky dialogue and overly-flashy photography, Rocknrolla is a return to form for Richie, aided by a talented cast, Kebbell in particular, and an irrepressible energy. All the Richie motifs are present and correct; criminal slang and inventive swearing, coincidental comedy, surprising violence, car chases and whip-crack edits. Although essentially another rethread of the ‘missing valuables’ story, Richie shows his mastery of character, filling out the presentation with funny asides, mainly at the expense of his floundering would-be hero Butler.

As you’d expect from the title, the shiny action is underlined by a blistering, brilliantly-chosen soundtrack, Richie’s trademark skills at matching sound and visuals reaching a peak with the fuzzy, growling 'Have Love Will Travel' from 1960s garage-rockers The Sonics. Currently preparing his Sherlock Holmes adaptation with Robert Downey Jr, Ritchie has already said Rocknrolla will form the first part of a trilogy of interconnected crime capers, a development to be cautiously welcomed.

Stranger Danger

Minimalist American home-invasion thriller The Strangers is a bit like Michael Haneke’s Funny Games without the fun and games; a stripped-down, carefully modulated examination of what happens when a young couple are subjected to a night of terror at the hands of three masked psychopaths.

Returning late to their remote holiday home after a friend’s wedding, Kristen and James (Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman) were supposed to have a romantic night of champagne and swing music, but she has just turned down his proposal of marriage. The atmosphere already strained, things get worse when a strange girl bangs on the door at four in the morning, asking for someone who doesn’t live there. Slowly and steadily, the situation escalates, more banging on the door, strange messages written on the window, things going missing until, eventually, the intruders are inside the house.

On debut, writer and director Bryan Bertino shows his acute understanding of the fundamentals of horror storytelling – the unknown is terrifying, tension is everything and panic is contagious. After a lengthy set-up, the first encounter between madman and victim is well drawn, ending in a chillingly choreographed reveal as the masked psycho looms into frame behind Tyler’s back. We might have sent his sort of thing a thousand times, but it’s still frightening, particularly when Bertino focuses on sound to add an extra sensory dimension to the coming apocalypse. From that point, the stage set, the director pulls the few strings in his cat-and-mouse story taut, extending the stresses across his carefully composed widescreen with scenes played momentarily longer than expected and vibrato screams pitched just short of dog whistles.

What should result is a sense of dread and fear, but the mood is broken by nagging irrationalities and clumsy exposition. In these modern times, in order to properly isolate characters being lined up for gory execution, at least twenty minutes must be spent disabling their mobile phones. Here, in her first clue that something might be amiss, Tyler’s mobile is thrown on a fire by an unseen hand. Like filling out forms in a dentist’s waiting room, these scenes require processing before the real action can begin, but they are tiresome and time-consuming. Having established the victims as a couple on the verge of splitting up, Tyler and Speedman have nothing to do but race from one end of the house to the other, dodging the maniac’s thrusting blade, until they come to realise that their interpersonal problems don’t amount to much in the bigger scheme of things. In this, Speedman is a convincingly anonymous everyman but Tyler struggles to overcome her famous face, her absolute lack of ordinariness dragging us out of the fantasy.

In as much as you can extract a message from a film where young lovers are chased to their deaths by sadistic killers for 90 minutes, The Strangers real thesis emerges when, in a particularly sticky moment, Kristen asks James to find “his Daddy’s shotgun”. In a culture that sees itself as being under constant threat from and unknown and unreasonable external force, and must take every effort to defend itself, the first priority is an armed response. Kristen and James were unprepared, and look what happens to them.

As an exercise in controlled bedlam, The Strangers is efficiently, effectively scary, but it owes too many debts, from Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs to James Foley’s Fear, via the mocking European ironists like Haneke and the French thriller Them, which it more or less remakes, without acknowledgement.

Life In Black & White

Following his triumphant examination of 1980s sink-estate Britain in This Is England, director Shane Meadow’s re-recruits his teenage star Thomas Turgoose for the contemporary follow-up, Somers Town, a minutely-observed portrait of youthful friendship set in an underdeveloped part of 1990s London.

Turgoose plays Tommo, a bright but troubled sixteen year-old who, for reasons we never quite discover, runs away from Nottingham to pitch up in Somers Town. On his first night on the streets, he is robbed by a gang of thugs who take his clothes and his money. Loitering in a café, Tommo meets Marek (Piotr Jagiello), a Polish immigrant teenager who lives in a nearby tower block with his father, a builder on the Channel Tunnel railway line.

The two lads are well met; Tommo is a talkative, cheeky troublemaker while photographer Marek is more sensitive and less certain of himself. With nowhere else to go, Tommo convinces Marek to allow him to hide in his room while his father is at work, or out drinking, and the pair form a bond through their shared isolation, boredom, lack of money and a growing obsession with French waitress Maria (Elisa Lasowski).

It doesn’t sound like much in synopsis, but over the course of his just-too-short 70 minutes, Meadows and his regular screenwriter Paul Fraser spin an affecting, unassuming story of outsiders making the best of difficult circumstances. Despite the bleak landscape, Meadows balances his theme of urban poverty and the immigrant struggle with customary earthy humour, relying on the natural, unaffected grace of his two inexperienced leads for semi-improvised banter. There could have been more of it, though.

Turgoose and Jagiello’s essentially optimistic performances are central to the film’s success, sharing a freewheeling chemistry that lights up the screen, particularly in their interactions with local wide-boy Graham (Perry Benson) and a long scene where they wreck the flat after swilling down their first bottle of wine. Meadows and cinematographer Natasha Braier present the story in glowing monochrome high-definition video with a simple, gritty lyricism that finds unexpected flecks of beauty in the corners of a city in transition.

The Devil's In The Details

The phenomenal success of his Spanish Civil War fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth turned Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro into a force in world cinema, but he goes back to his comic-book roots for his follow-up Hellboy II: The Golden Army, delivering an even-better sequel to his 2004 comedy-action-adventure, this time pitting his demonic hero against a mechanical army led by a goblin king determined to rid the world of humans.

Having already shown us Hellboy’s beginnings, summoned from hell by Rasptin (to help the Nazis fight WWII), Del Toro opens with his adopted father Professor Bruttenholm (John Hurt) telling the red-faced, horned and now five year old demon a bedtime story. Here, in a beautifully realised stop-motion animation, we see the origins of the story to come – an ancient war between humanity and goblins - while teasing us with just how achingly gorgeous it will be.

In the short version, man and fairy share an uneasy truce: we get the cities, they keep the forests. But humanity has reneged on the deal, and destroyed the natural world. In an effort to save his people, Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) defies his father the king of the goblins and plots to awaken the Golden Army: 70 times 70 robot warriors buried under the Giant’s Causeway in Antrim. Standing against him in the upcoming battle is the fire-engine faced Hellboy (Ron Perlman), his fire-spewing lover Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) and super-intelligent merman Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), who all work for a secret government agency, keeping the real world safe from fantastical creatures. Tensions mount when their boss (the very funny Jeffrey Tambor) drafts in a new mission specialist, an ectoplasmic German called Johann Krauss who has been transformed into a wisp of shape-shifting smoke, trapped inside a clanking bell-diver’s suit.

Ron Perlman gives another winning performance as the cigar-choming, wise-crack spouting anti-hero, his massive chest carved with arcane tattoos and his right arm cast in crunching concrete. He’s tough on the outside, but tender underneath, loving kittens and Barry Manilow and desperate not to lose the love of his life, Liz. This romantic element is sustained with surprising effectiveness throughout the adventure to come, a sign of the film’s true intentions, to marry explosive action and eye-popping monsters with the grand themes of love, unity and ecology. This last element, the death of the natural world, is lyrically communicated in a vast sequence where Hellboy must battle a leafy, green God of the Woods and later, strike a bargain with the Angel of Death, a gruesome creature with a hundred eyes strewn across its black wings.

There are echoes of the classics of fantasy cinema throughout Hellboy II; a princess carrying a powerful charm from Star Wars, the half-forgotten fairy folk asserting their right to live as they do in Narnia while the endlessly fascinating Troll Market brings to mind the hidden places of Harry Potter. Del Toro isn’t paying homage; he goes deeper than that, taking as his source the stories that inspired these stories. Filled with moments of genuine visual wonder, the film is a unique accomplishment, standing in stark contrast to the soulless production-line of summer blockbuster entertainment, made to achieve a profit margin. Del Toro has loftier targets to hit.

This is a filmmaker with a unique way of seeing the world, but better than that, he has an innate understanding of how myths legends work in the mind of the viewer. He knows what it is about legends that entertain us and how, when properly told, they can still deliver powerful messages.

Bra Vo

Winner of the Best First Film award at last year’s Galway Film Fleadh, Marian Quinn’s charming, tender 32A is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story set in Dublin’s Raheny in 1979. We first meet 13 year-old Maeve (Ailish McCarthy) as she tries on her first bra, the measurement the same at the bus route to her suburban estate. Maeve and her friends are obsessed with breasts and bras, staring chest-height at other women and endlessly discussing their burgeoning pubescence. From there, the formative events of Maeve’s young life are covered in a familiar rite of passage, from her first period to her first kiss and her first disco (the Northside’s legendary Grove, complete with DJ Cecil Nolan in a cameo). When they meet at a party and spend an innocent night racing around a garden, Maeve starts dating the local heartthrob, sixteen year old Brian Power (Shane McDaid). Her friends can’t believe it, and their sense of injustice is doubled when Maeve skips an important meeting to go on a date instead.

Quinn places these emotional moments, humiliations and embarrassments against the backdrop of Maeve’s mother Jean (Orla Brady) spending time in hospital with “women’s problems”, while across the road, her best friend Ruth (Sophie Jo Wasson) is looking to reconnect with her long-lost father (Jared Harris), against the wishes of her bitter mother (played by the director herself). Although each element of the storyline fizzes with the same mood of teenage angst and shares the same sense of observation, the film struggles to tie these separate threads into a compelling whole, sketching outlines of an emotional landscape but leaving perceptible blank areas on the canvas.

Despite that uncertainty, the young cast give lively, unaffected performances taken, no doubt, from their own recent experiences. As Maeve, newcomer Ailish McCarthy is a real find; beautifully expressing the excitement of discovery through a big pair of blue eyes and later, nimbly finding the faces required to express frustration and disappointment without letting anyone other than the camera know. Her gang of friends (Wasson, Riona Smith and Orla Long) share an irrepressible energy, guiding one another over the various teenage hurdles before falling out, snubbing one another with consummate authenticity. More than boys and bras, its here at the centre of a gaggle of girls that 32A finds its heart.

From the magenta masthead on the Evening Press to the precise shade of industrial green paint on the walls, Quinn recreates late 1970’s Dublin with tremendous facility. Costume, production design and soundtrack are all note-perfect and the film is superbly photographed by PJ Dillon.

Mommy Issues

The third instalment of Stephen Sommer’s Mummy franchise, The Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor finally nails the lid down on the dusty old sarcophagus, seven years after the original revival gave a significant fillip to the action-adventure genre while handily providing Brendan Fraser with something to do in movies.

Last seen battling the supernatural Scorpion King in Egypt in the 1930s, Fraser’s thrill-seeking archaeologist Rick O'Connell is now retired in the post-war English countryside, living the life of a country gent with his wife Evelyn (Maria Bello, stepping in for Rachel Weisz, who has graduated from this sort of thing). He’s learning how to fish and shoot while she writes adventure novels but they both yearn for the old excitements. When a spook from MI5 arrives at the house and asks them to deliver the mysteriously glowing Eye of Shangri-La diamond to a museum in Shanghai, they quickly agree, in the process reuniting with Evelyn’s brother Jonathan (John Hannah) and their twenty-year old son Alex (Luke Ford), a dashing adventurer and a chip of the old block.

Alex has recently discovered the long-lost tomb of the Dragon Emperor (Kung Fu superstar Jet Li) hidden in the vast underground chamber that holds his terracotta army. The opening prologue has already told us how, thousands of years before, the ruthless Emperor betrayed the powerful sorceress Zi Yuan (Michelle Yeoh) by killing her beloved after she had agreed to grant him a magical immortality. Instead she imprisoned him and his legions in clay and buried them underground. Now, with the O’Connell’s having delivered the diamond that revives him, the undead Dragon Emperor is returned to power and starts a new campaign of death and destruction.

In his first film since the disastrous Stealth, director Rob Cohen masticates this material into an unattractive bolus of computer-generated mush. The resulting goo lacks any genuine thrill or sense of entertainment, but it is noisy and belligerent. Late on, Li and Yeoh face off in a typically nimble sword fight, but it's a fleeting moment. Fraser and Ford are closely matched as father and son, in that both give equally bland and tuneless performances, not helped by the witless script’s cheesy one-liners, aiming for sparkling Golden Age repartee and landing on news anchor banter.

The usually edgy Bello is hamstrung by not being Rachel Weisz. A wobbly cut-glass accent and scant reason to be there finally collapse her. Even further in the distance, John Hannah’s familar slapstick comic relief suffers the same inane scripting; being at one point upstaged by an airsick animatronic yak. Liam Cunningham does his best as Mad Dog Maguire (no relation), a wild-eyed Irish pilot with a limited sense of self-preservation and a propensity for inappropriate balladeering, but there's nothing anyone could do to revive this corpse.

ET, Phone In

The X Files was the monumental success story of television in the 1990s, the seemingly endless adventures of moody crackpot Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and his reluctant medical sidekick Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), devoted to uncovering conspiracies, chasing monsters and seeking out E.T. Now, ten years on from their first big-screen adaptation and nine years after everybody stopped caring, the partners are reunited in I Want To Believe when a female FBI agent is abducted in snowy West Virginia and a psychic priest claims to know where she is.

Spooky Mulder is now a recluse, living under the radar in a remote farmhouse in self-enforced retirement, spending his days clipping strange stories from the newspapers and cultivating a rabbinical beard. His former partner has left the FBI and is now a hospital paediatrician, working on a particularly tricky case of a young boy with a brain disease. When the agency – in the form of rapper Xzibit and Amanda Peet - come and ask Scully to reconnect them with Mulder, she convinces him to take on the case, in the process rekindling their romantic relationship and convincing him to leave the house. The plot thickens when another woman is abducted from a swimming pool and Father Joe (Billy Connelly) once more leads the cops to uncover vital clues, seemingly driven by angelic visions. But the priest is a convicted paedophile, the missing women have mysterious connections and the new FBI agents don’t trust the old guard anymore.

It’s a complicated story, but not that much more so. Remove the supernatural X-Files hook and this is just another gloomy cop drama, steadily traipsing through a procession of ethereal clues and not-so cunning misdirections, feeble stand-offs set against tepid chases and choreographed procedure. As the agents race around the snow-bound landscapes searching for the missing women, Scully is drawn into a battle with the religious hospital administrators when she suggests treating her dying patient with experimental stem-cells. This she accomplishes by googling “stem-cell research”, printing off a ream of documents, scratching her head and then, in the next scene, confidently injecting the child’s brain with a syringe filled with pink goo.

Duchovny and Anderson do bring a convincing maturity, call it tiredness, to their best-known creations but their chemistry is not nearly enough to carry the lumpy story, which starts without involvement and doesn’t improve. Opposite them, Connelly is miscast as the spooky priest, unable to add any complexity or emotion to what is an underwritten, lazily sketched character, polishing his Scottish burr on the choice dialogue. In the end, all three resort to gimmicks and tics to struggle through the signposts; wearily pitting God against Science and seemingly uninterested in the outcome. Written and directed by the series originator Chris Carter, there is just enough here for hardcore fans on a nostalgia trip but almost nothing of the old mystery remains.

Highly Strung

‘Breathtaking’ is a rather over used word in film criticism; a handy catch-all phrase that describes everything from a starlet’s liquid eyes to pyrotechnic stuntwork or pretty landscape photography. It is only rarely employed to express the actual sensation of gasping in a cinema seat, but that’s what happens in James Marsh’s dizzying documentary Man On Wire, about a day in 1974 when a daredevil Frenchman strung a high-wire across the gap between New York’s Twin Towers and walked out into the ether.

A circus performer from a young age, the pixie-like Philippe Petit had already attracted the world’s attention by traversing the towers of Notre Dame cathedral and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, but as he tells it himself in a series of interviews, from the moment he saw an architect’s drawing of the World Trade Centre in a newspaper, he knew would have to try to cross it. From that half-cracked idea, Petit and his team of accomplices spent eight months planning the execution of what they called their ‘coup’ in painstaking detail. Like a team of bank robbers preparing a heist, they would have to find a way to gain access to the top of the half-finished towers, carry the 200 foot cable into position, secure it against the high winds at 1350 feet and do it all without getting caught.

Structured like a thriller, Marsh (who previously directed the oddball Wisconsin Death Trip and the equally edgy drama The King) uses new interviews, archive footage and seamless reconstructions to bring us inside Petit’s unique world of risk and danger, brilliantly evoking a time and place and making the audience - even those unaffected by acrophobia - feel like part of the adventure.

Petit, who was only 24 when he completed the walk, makes for an engaging interview subject; still driven by his unique artistic vision and an endless supply of adrenaline. His accomplices, including his then girlfriend, exasperated best friend and the inside man, a thrill-seeking American lawyer, each give their chronological version of the event, recalling the constant sense of danger but also the simple joy involved in pulling off a high-concept prank. The result is an engaging and compelling documentary that dances on the line between art and obsession, the knee-trembling images beautifully matched to Michael Nyman’s evocative score.

Jokers Wild

After successfully redrawing the origins of his superhero character in Batman Begins three years ago, British director Christopher Nolan continues his story in the morbid and dangerous Dark Knight; a thrilling crime story cut with an acid misanthropy and one of the films of the year.

Opening with a brilliantly choreographed bank robbery, the film soon establishes Batman’s (Christian Bale) struggle to bring peace to Gotham City. As the media accuse Batman of being an all-powerful vigilante, the mafia have tightened their grip on the underworld, with the help of malevolent outside influences disguised as investment capitalists. But even the collected criminal gangs are unprepared for a new threat, the dangerously psychotic Joker (Heath Ledger), an amoral criminal who believes in nothing but disorder. While the Joker hatches his plans to destroy the city and its masked hero, District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and his girlfriend Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) are positioning themselves to affect a political solution to the crime wave, with the help of Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman).

Seeing an opportunity to rescue Batman from the camp excesses of the 1990s, director Christopher Nolan and his brother and co-writer Jonathan elevate their superhero from the doldrums of genre-bound familiarity and in the process, redefine blockbuster entertainment. This is a movie that takes the mythology and accoutrements of its familiar central character and turns it into a meditation on bleak themes and unsettling politics that speaks directly to how the world is today. The Dark Knight is a morality play that casts good against evil, order against chaos but more than that, it comprehensively blurs the lines between right and wrong, carefully measuring out how far the good can go to do the right thing, and directly questioning the morality of those methods. These are not issues the malevolent Joker is overly concerned with, as Alfred says “some people just want to watch the world burn”, these are aspects of Batman’s own consciousness, closely wrapped in his own struggle with his identity, his motivations and his reasoning. Nolan creates a shadowed world where being a hero is a Sisyphean struggle, where triumph is snatched away as soon as it is won and order is impossible.

Batman is only as strong as the villain that opposes him, and Ledger provides an indelible bad guy. Arriving fully formed and unexplained, The Joker is a creation of pure untrammelled evil, a creepy sadist in an unsettling green suit, flashing his favoured knives (“so I can savour the moment”) and compulsively licking his torn lips. From behind his greasy white makeup, smudged black eyes and livid red scars, Ledger gives a chillingly hypnotic performance; frightening and violent but also intimate and occasionally sympathetic. More than what he looks like, it is what he represents that is the true horror of The Joker and Ledger clearly revels in becoming the unknowable engineer of bedlam, who believes in nothing other than himself. He has no morals, no conscience, no ambition beyond anarchy, no scheme to foil. He is the ultimate terrorist, and Batman can only stop him by, in part, becoming like him.

Faced with this powerhouse, Bale’s Batman is reduced, relying on a hoarse rasping delivery and all-powerful physicality when suited up and the actor’s easy charm and confidence when playing the playboy Bruce Wayne. The rest of the cast are again perfectly chosen. Michael Caine returns as the desert-dry butler Alfred and Gary Oldman reprises his honest cop Gordon, now promoted to Commissioner. Maggie Gyllenhaal takes over for the hapless Katie Holmes, playing the lost-love Rachel as a smart lawyer determined to fight for good while Aaron Eckhart is outstanding in the thanklessly straight role of politician Harvey Dent, aided by a stomach-churning transformation into the half-mad Two-Face, who should perhaps be nicknamed Half-Face.

More than his skill with the actors, Nolan has a consummate sense of place, creating a Gotham where even daylight is cast in a sombre blue, a beautifully realised place of towering skyscrapers and ash-blown cellars. Even in gloom, this is a beautiful production, emphatically photographed, edited with skill and precision and underlined with a driving score of throbbing chords and abstracted heavy metal. Six of the film’s most elaborate special effects sequences have been shot in the 65 millimetre IMAX format, adding a breathtaking sense of scale and pin-point visual precision to the already hyperkinetic action.

The Dark Knight is scattered, confused and frightening. It unfolds in fits and starts, breaking from one carefully positioned dramatic moment to rain chaos down on its characters. If Batman Begins showed us that in Nolan’s hands, this material is not just for the comic books, the sequel underlines that ambition. This is a haunted tragedy that recasts the ancient myths of the hero in an ultramodern nihilism, achieving a complexity of feeling that is difficult to achieve in any kind of art, let alone the multi-million dollar studio summer movie. It is simply unmissable.

Memento Mori

In one-of-a-kind Guy Maddin’s paean to Manitoba’s cold and sleepy capital city, the Canadian surrealist analyses his relationship with his home town, its history, the people and his own family for My Winnipeg, an archly comic, monochrome pseudo-documentary.

Over the course of his nine features and umpteen short films, Maddin has honed his unique method – influenced by silent films, industrial shorts, golden age melodramas and camp science fiction serials – to create a flavoursome, visually breathtaking body of work unlike any other. It is also one which you will either love or hate on sight. In My Winnipeg, commissioned by the local government, Maddin pens a fluid biography of the snowbound city, using old stock footage, puppetry, video and painstaking recreations, one of which opens the film. We then cut to a long poetic sequence on a moving train as Maddin, (played by Darcy Fehr) tries one more time to leave Winnipeg for good. Maddin narrates his story in a sonorous baritone, blending old legends and questionable history with an acid critique of the town’s efforts to modernise itself and fantasies about his youth and his family.

As Maddin tells it, Winnipeg is a place of dreams, its citizens sleepwalking through the streets at night dreaming of the ancient natives and lost underground rivers. They dream of lost back streets, forgotten department stores, old sporting glories and strange historical happenings; like when horses fled a stable fire and were trapped in a freezing river to, overnight, become a macabre sculpture garden for local picnickers. Maddin recreates it all, from the waving skaters astride the staring, icy horse heads to an infamous Masonic séance that channelled the god of the bison through a psychic ballerina. The director himself plays a role in these intricate restorations, describing how he made a facsimile of his childhood home and cast actors to play his siblings. His mother, he tells us, was herself an actress, starring in a local soap opera called Ledge Man where, every day for 50 years, she talked a suicidal man down from the side of a building with sweet words and gentle encouragements.

We are told Mrs Maddin is playing herself, but in fact, the role is taken by Ann Savage, a leading lady in 1940’s noirs, most notably the surreal classic Detour. I didn’t recognise her - she is 87 now - but seeing her name in the credits, I was tempted to find out what else Maddin had invented. Are the city streets in fact named after famous brothel keepers? Is there a by-law that allows Winnipeggers to keep the keys to their old homes? Was his convent school really named “The Academy of the Super Vixens”? Did a corrupt mayor once fix the result of the annual Golden Boy male beauty pageant? No, of course not, but it doesn’t matter. In Maddin’s singular imagination this is how it happened and he spins from those fragments a fascinating, funny tale of place and time, loss and remembrance.

Maim Mama!

Theatre director Phyllida Llloyd makes her feature debut with this starry-cast but horribly saccharine adaptation of the stage musical, based on the lyrics of Abba songs.

The story of Mamma Mia! is wafer thin. Meryl Streep plays Donna, a fifty-something former showgirl who owns a dilapidated hotel on a Greek Island. Her twenty year old daughter Sophie, played by Amanda Seyfried (the dippy blonde in Mean Girls) is about to marry her sweetheart Sky (Dominic Cooper), with the ceremony to be held at the hotel. Having read her mother’s secret diary, Sophie has discovered that her father could have been one of three former lovers that Donna met over the course of a very busy month years before. Desperate to meet her father before her marriage, she invites all three, (Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgård) to come to the island. Thus met, the gang then race around looking for reasons to sing Abba songs - lyrics crammed to fit the situation - before a predictably sweet and sun-kissed conclusion. For ‘Dancing Queen’, they have a dance and crown a queen. ‘I Have A Dream’ allows Sophie dreams of her real dad. 'Money, Money Money' brings about a discussion of the hotel’s precarious finances. On it goes, a race through twenty songs from the back catalogue, each of the principals getting their moment in centre stage, the story trailing along behind them.

So it’s rubbish. Upbeat, inoffensive and determined to entertain, but rubbish nonetheless. The biggest challenge of any musical is integrating the songs into an interesting, credible story; so it feels ‘natural’ when the actors suddenly break into song. That never happens here. Mamma Mia! is jazzed-up karaoke, a feeble excuse to run through the Abba classics, hanging limply from the bare branches of a gossamer story.

Streep, who last sang on screen in Postcards From The Edge, has a fine, clear voice, with her natural exuberance covering most of Donna’s character inadequacies. Likewise, Julie Walters gives it both barrels as best friend Rosie, belting out her numbers and kicking her heels to disguise a shaky, uninvolving presence. As the pairs preening rich-bitch friend Tanya, comedienne Christine Baranski carries most of the film’s sense of camp, a burden that proves too much for her.

From the men, only Pierce Brosnan shows any sign of having twigged the ridiculous nature of proceedings. He nervously warbles his way through a few numbers, his strained expression and awkward movements betraying his acute discomfort. Firth, as the millionaire lawyer Harry, plays a former punk but that still doesn’t excuse his tuneless screeching. As the adventurer Bill, Stellan Skarsgård doesn’t even attempt an entire number, wisely delivering his few lines in a croaking sing-song and hiding somewhere during the more bombastic set-pieces.

If the singing is a disappointment, the unconvincing sets and chocolate-box photography are even more so; the airy, fluent location exteriors crassly matched with the over-lit, unconvincing studio settings. Director Lloyd, who originated the stage show, lacks the basic technical and narrative skills to make the film bounce. A broad, flat and silly film, Mamma Mia! is strictly for the fans.

Going Gently

The tangled life of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas is told through the lives of the two women who loved him in Love Is The Devil director John Maybury’s artful, awkward The Edge of Love.

Opening during the Blitz in a tube station, we first meet the beautiful Vera Phillips (Keira Knightly) as she sings an uplifting song to the huddled Londoners. Watching her is a soldier, William Killick (Cillian Murphy), who trails her to a nearby pub when the all clear is sounded. There, Vera has meet her lifelong friend the poet Dylan Thomas, in the city to work on a propaganda documentary. Propping up the bar with the tempestuous writer is his wife Caitlin (Sienna Miller), and soon all four are joined in a squared-off relationship, Killick and Thomas butting heads over Vera’s affections while she and Caitlin strike up a thorny friendship, clouded with elements of jealously and rivalry. Before he is sent overseas, Killick and Vera marry and she returns with Thomas and Caitlin to a seaside town in Wales to wait for his return. There, away from the world, the competition between the two women becomes more irrational and intense.

As the twinned objects of the poet’s affections, Miller and Knightly give fine, nuanced performances, in turn delicate and boisterous. Miller in particular is a revelation as the fiery, feisty Caitlin, brilliantly evoking the pain of living with genius, made even more anxious by the imminent prospect of death and ruin in wartime. Knightly as her rival and best friend plays Vera in much the same way as she did her lead in Atonement, her practical façade cracking under heartfelt emotional pressures. Their relationship is the heart of the film, and both prove worthy of the assignment.

Although he looks the part, Rhys cannot find the power in his voice to match the poet’s words, unable to match the rolling, tumbling intonation of the poet, a disappointment given that Thomas recorded much of his work on tape. His recitation in voice-over of one of Thomas’ best known poems, Lament (“When I was a windy boy and a bit…”) is weak and flat. Worse than that, the actor gives such a dislikeable performance, full of actorly tics and goggle-eyed mooning, that he never gives us any reason to believe that two women would have fallen so deeply in love with him. His lechery seems half-hearted, his alcoholism and depravity an overly careful, measured descent. Murphy, as the damaged soldier Killick, gives a far more interesting performance, full of bravado and wit but the war absents him for long sections, returning him in a shell-shocked trance as a remote, jealous misfit. Pushed by his own demons into an act of desperation, Murphy brilliantly evokes the man’s panic and fear but the constantly self-referencing script noticeably deflates his performance, repeatedly underlining emotions the actor is well able to communicate himself the first time.

Despite being flawed in its execution dramatically muddled and jumpy in tone, The Edge of Love is a well mounted and, for the most part, well acted drama about fascinating people in extraordinary circumstances. It tries very hard to distil these freewheeling characters into easily digestible nuggets of information, but Maybury cannot give them their required force, leaving us still waiting for the definitive film about Dylan Thomas.

I Know Kung Fu

In DreamWorks funny and charming Kung Fu Panda, the titular black-and-white bear is Po (Jack Black), son of noodle-selling father Mr. Ping (James Hong) with secret dreams of becoming a kung-fu expert like his heroes, The Furious Five. One day, the Kung Fu Master Oogway (Randall Duk Kim) has a premonition that the evil snow leopard warrior Tai Lung (Ian McShane) will escape prison and destroy the town unless a warrior is chosen to stop him. Tai Lung is a former student of Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), the trainer of the Furious Five, Tigress (Angelina Jolie), Monkey (Jackie Chan), Mantis (Seth Rogen), Viper (Lucy Liu), and Crane (David Cross). Through a series of misfortunes, the mystical Oogway picks Po as the champion, and so begins a familiar, but inherently entertaining, story of overcoming obstacles and achieving dreams.

In real life, Black’s incessant jabbering has made him an increasingly difficult presence but in animated form his childish, high-tempo act suits the simple-hearted, easy-to-assemble Po, requiring little more than gumption, crisis and the battle for glory to construct a worthy hero. From the outset, Kung Fu Panda is a winning combination of knockabout farce, ticklesome one-liners, easily digested lectures and blur-motion fight sequences. It’s a wuxia story that’s a framework for jokes, not the other way around. The period setting eliminates any of the incessant pop culture references that blot other animations, and there is no discernable trace of the self-aware cynicism that can find its way into the new wave of digital cartoons, aimed squarely at the audience’s more worldly chaperones. Kung Fu Panda is innocent entertainment, a cartoon first and foremost.

And what an attractive animation it is. The opening dream sequence is a striking, Samurai Jack inspired arrangement of blacks and reds, swooping shapes and punchy action. The character designs are extraordinarily charming. Po has a waddling walk and big-boned presence, dwarfing his tiny Yoda-like mentor and clashing with his team of limber animal ninjas, their distinctive moves taken from the fighting styles they represent. The animators have crafted an array of beautifully lit, artfully composed background vistas, peopled with a constant rhubarb of sweetly observed villagers –pigs and ducks and rabbits. It is DreamWorks’ best-looking movie so far, stunningly rendered and presented with obvious affection for the long history of Asian martial arts cinema.

Pixar’s eco-themed Wall-E is likely to steal much of this bumptious film’s thunder, but if kids are looking to see both, grown-ups shouldn’t complain.

Green Eyed Monster

Louis Leterrier’s surprisingly compelling re-imagining of The Incredible Hulk (more the 1970s television show than Ang Lee’s overly lyrical misfire from 2003) sees Edward Norton takes over from Eric Bana as Bruce Banner; a government scientist blasted by gamma rays when a nuclear experiment goes wrong and condemned, Jekyll & Hyde-like, to carry a monster within him that he cannot control.

Be in your seat on time because much of this Hulk’s origins are explained in the opening credits, flashes of prologue flitting between images of mutating cells and pumping veins, accompanied by a reworking of the haunting score from the 1970s television show. As an on-screen graphic explains, Banner hasn’t had an ‘episode’ for 150 days, thanks to the meditation techniques he has learned from a martial arts master at his hideout in Rio de Janeiro’s favela. Banner’s attempts to control his body are part of his search for an antidote to his unique condition, which famously becomes unmanageable when he is angered.

But his military paymasters, personified by grim-faced General Ross (William Hurt), who also happens to be the father of Banner’s girlfriend Betty (Liv Tyler), want him back in the US so they can use his irradiated blood to create a new breed of genetically-modified super-soldiers. Ross sends a crack squad of commandos, led by the deadly Blonsky (Tim Roth) down to Brazil to bring Banner back. Following a breakneck chase, he escapes, making his way back to Betty’s office in a university campus and a painful reunion. But the army are close behind, and Ross has found a way to create a worthy adversity for the all-powerful Hulk by injecting a willing Blonsky with a sample of his blood.

Norton, always willing to take a risk, gives an excellent performance as the tortured boffin desperate to exorcise a curse of his own creation. At least, until the computers take over and he morphs into a giant, green, imaginary object. Even Norton cannot act through such a dense binary mask. Nevertheless, when in human form, Norton is always interesting and self-contained. Alongside him, Liv Tyler offers heart and hope as the loyal Betty with the two of them presenting a likewise credible and frequently touching romantic relationship, quickly drawn in tight, emotional scenes and well sustained throughout.

Director Leterrier, working from a script by comic-book specialist Zak Penn and Norton, brings his high-octane action movie sensibilities to the material, staging a well-measured succession of blistering set-pieces and pyrotechnic fight scenes. Banner and Betty don't become fully rounded characters, but this lack of probing insight suits the material far better than his predecessor’s tortured art-house moping. This Hulk hasn’t got time for angst; the film is driven at a breathless pace by a straight-ahead plot and endless action. There are frequent asides for summer-friendly comic moments – Marvel creator Stan Lee gets his obligatory cameo and the original television behemoth Lou Ferrigno pops up as a pizza-munching security guard.

Never short on spectacle, this bravura blockbuster noticeably collapses in the last twenty minutes into a mush of over-digitized combat - the streets of New York are again, flattened-but what had gone before was solidly entertaining, hitting all the marks expected by fans with careful - probably too careful - precision.

We Are Three

It's the third blog-a-versary here at Confessions of a Film Critic. Yay me. Thanks to those that read the posts, nobody seems to comment much but thanks to those few that do and roll on another year.

It Keeps Happening...

Reading these guys pick apart just how awful The Happening really, truly is, almost makes me want to see it again.

Just to keep up with the dissection, like an anatomy student in a glass-walled gallery flipping through a textbook. In comparison I was only prodding the corpse with a stick, from four feet away.

It goes to show you how important film criticism is, even if only to shield the audience from the gore. And a surgeon gets to wear rubber gloves.