Whip It

After nearly twenty years and countless false dawns, everyone’s favourite archaeologist adventurer dusts himself down for one more globetrotting escapade as one of the most eagerly awaited sequels in cinema history finally arrives.

Opening with a zeitgeist-setting drag race down a dusty desert road, with Elvis Presley blaring on the AM, director Steven Spielberg hits the ground running with a dramatic entry into the legendary Hangar 51 in Roswell, New Mexico, where our hero Indiana (Harrison Ford) and his sidekick Mac (Ray Winstone) have been captured by Commies posing as American soldiers. Its 1957, the height of the Cold War, and the Reds, led by the sinister, sword-wielding Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), have infiltrated the same enormous warehouse that closed Raiders of the Lost Ark to find a mysterious magnetic crystal skull which they want to develop into an all-powerful weapon.

This opening twenty minute blast sets a standard the rest of the film struggles at times to meet. Room must be made for talkative sections that will describe the plot. Indiana discovering his former flame Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) has been keeping a secret from him, cueing the entrance of rebellious young biker Mutt (Shia LaBeouf), introduced in a nod to Marlon Brando in The Wild One and never without his switchblade and quiff-tidying comb. Then, when Dean Stanforth (Jim Broadbent) explains to Indiana that he is being suspended from teaching while the FBI investigate his loyalties, Jones teams up with Mutt to find the skull, best Spalko and the Commies and clear his name.

Perfectly in keeping with the traditions of this treasured series, Indiana Jones & The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is big, bravura cinema, determined from the off to provide a rollercoaster ride of dizzying spectacle, breakneck stunt work and hyperkinetic action. Although Spielberg promised to keep the computer-generated stuff to a minimum, the film is awash with digitally manipulated sequences, some less polished than others, removing an element of physicality that becomes progressively less involving. When the story does pause for breath, something of the original wit and sparkle is gone; there are fewer funny lines or slapstick moments, with a coterie of chirping prairie dogs over-employed as comic relief and few scant traces of the chemistry between Ford and the under-used Karen Allen remaining. At its best, however, the film has moments that stand proud alongside anything in the previous three films. Indy’s frantic search through a typically Spielberg suburb - this one peopled with plastic figures - while escaping a nuclear test is a standout; eerie, smart and brilliantly realised.

From here on, the film becomes a chase. In one long blur, Spielberg gives us an elaborately constructed sword-fight, an attack by giant ants, a chase along a jungle ravine and three, count ‘em, tumbles over vertiginous waterfalls before arriving at the City of Gold and setting up another round of thrills. It is breathless stuff, moving at such a rapid pace that it is difficult to retain your bearings, but fast enough to introduce novel excitements before the previous adrenal thrill subsides.

Despite the lumpy exposition, in the end the story exists only to give us more time with Indiana Jones and this much it achieves, from the opening theme tune to the snatched fedora and the cracking bullwhip. At 65, Ford gives a full-blooded, skilfully nuanced performance, cheerfully accepting the script’s occasional comic reference to his advanced years and creaking knees. Beside him, LaBeouf and Winstone double-team as capable sidekicks while Blanchett drips venom and allure in equal measure as a delightful baddie. None of the rest makes any impression; Allen is abandoned to smiling reaction shots while the assembled troop of Russians blend into the stunning backgrounds.

Never less than entertaining, Crystal Skull isn’t quite the film we have waited two decades for, being saggy in the middle and occasionally confused, but its close enough.

Sweetness And Light

Forget the four spiteful mannequins tottering around New York, the real Sex & The City is happening in hot, dusty Beirut where five women bond over blow-dries in a run-down beauty salon. Written and directed by debutant Nadine Labaki, who also plays shop-owner Layale, Caramel (Sukkar Banat) takes its title from the boiled sugar used to remove unwanted body hair from pernickety patrons, but fits just as well with the golden, sticky tone of the film itself.

Labaki’s Layale is a modern Lebanese woman still caught in the gaps of a chancing society. Outwardly successful, she lives at home with her parents, sharing a room with her younger brother. Although beautiful and self-assured, she is having a greasy affair with a married man, oblivious to the attentions of the local traffic policeman, who takes every chance he can get to talk to her. Her colleagues in the shop include Nisrine (Yasmine Al Masri), about to marry into a conservative Muslim family, but frightened to tell her fiancée that she is no longer a virgin. Then there’s Rima, a hip young shampooist whose eyes take on an unmistakable glisten when her favourite customer – another woman – walks through the door. Across the street there’s the seamstress Rose, a woman in her sixties looking after her elderly sister and gently deflecting the charismatic attentions of a debonair older gentleman. Their friend and customer Jamale (Gisele Aouad) is a divorced mother of two and part-time actress, fighting a losing battle to stay young and beautiful.

These are messy, convincing lives, and Labaki shows a steady hand in guiding us through each of them satisfactorily, with one eye on their emotions and another on the world they are travelling through, drawing on her love of the city, her keen eye for detail and an instinctive desire to tell a rounded story. Whether it’s the novelty of the culture, the easy charm of the mostly non-professional performers or the subtle but cutting threads of political comment, Labaki’s film manages to overcome its familiarity (as Steel Magnolias, mainly) to be something utterly beguiling and genuinely touching, lacking any self-aware sentimentality or sneaky over-romanticising. A gorgeous scene when a gentleman admirerer watches Layala on the phone and mouths his own romantic responses, distills the whole into an essence; clever, arresting and heart-soaringly amorous. Of the three films from first-time directors in Irish cinemas this weekend, Labaki’s is by some distance the most assured, most humane and consistently surprising.

Doom And Gloom

British writer and director Neil Marshall announced himself as a potential B-movie auteur with 2005’s queasily claustrophobic horror The Descent, but squanders all of that promise, along with his bigger budget, in the dispiritingly derivative adventure Doomsday.

A lumpy splicing of all the best bits from Mad Max, 28 Days Later, Escape From New York and Aliens, Doomsday opens with a familiar set-up for the post-apocalypse when something called the Reaper virus sweeps through Scotland, causing everyone to break out in oozing boils and fall over dead. Rather than effect a rescue, the quasi-fascist British government decide to quarantine the entire country by building a huge wall around it and waiting for things to get quiet. Thirty years later, a spy satellite shows signs of people back on the streets of Glasgow, so slimy government gonk Canaris (David O’Hara) sends crack one-eyed super-agent Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra) over the wall to check it out.

After losing most of her squad fighting off a rampaging horde of futuristic cannibal punks led by the unhinged Sol (Craig Conway), Eden arrives at the medieval castle of mad scientist Kane (Malcolm McDowell), who takes her on a guided tour of the plot. Following a few tedious battles with anachronistic knights, she makes her escape in a handy if somewhat miraculous sports-car, being chased by the yodelling punks in their modified Mad Max motors. Meanwhile, in a poorly realised split narrative, back in London Canaris has taken power in a coup d’etat, despite the fidgety attentions of rain-coated copper Nelson (Bob Hoskins).

Take the endless references and inspirations away, and there isn't much left in Doomsday; the entire thing plays out without a solitary line of decent dialogue, a memorable character or single frame that wasn’t larcenously acquired from another, far superior, movie. Even the numerous action sequences, the main draw for genre fans, are scuttled by poor photography and inattentive, stroboscopic editing. The whole shuddering shambles plays out like a 1980s action movie clip from Be Kind Rewind; a dilettante attempt to pass someone else’s work off as your own.

Hard Nut

The summer blockbuster season kicks off with Jon Favreau’s Iron Man, a gutsy adaptation of the Marvel comic superhero that offers a standardised origin story typical of a first instalment in a franchise but one as determined to subtly subvert the genre as it is to provide pyrotechnic popcorn thrills.

The first good thing the director does is cast the 43 year old Robert Downey Jr as his deeply flawed hero, Tony Stark. An egotistical, alcoholic billionaire weapons dealing playboy, we first meet Stark on his way through the Afghan desert having demonstrated a deadly new missile system. His convoy is attacked, his escorts are killed and Stark is captured by a ragtag insurgent army, led by the sinister Raza (Faran Tahir). Half-dead, Stark’s life is saved by the quick intervention of another detainee, Yinsen (Shaun Toub), who implants a magnetic heart in his chest and nurses him back to health. Soon however, his captors make their demands clear – Stark must build them a copy of his new weapon, even as the recovering soon-to-be-superhero is discovering that they are already in possession of a huge arsenal of his guns.

Already established as a mechanical genius, it comes as little surprise when Stark uses the resources available in the cave to instead build a suit of armour and fight his way out of the desert. Returned to America and reunited with his Army friend Rhodes (Terrence Howard) and his loyal assistant Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), Stark calls a press conference where he announces that his company will no longer make weapons and will instead look to develop alternative energy systems. This comes as a shock to his trusted commercial lieutenant Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges), who watches the share price plummet as the media take up the story of Stark’s Damascene conversion from wildcat death-merchant to tree-hugging peacenik. As Stark hides away in his beach-front mansion, developing his flying metal suit, his enemies gather at the gates in row: the US Military, who want him onside, the terrorists, who want his guns and the bald-headed Stane, who wants to continue milking the Stark Industries cash cow.

It’s refreshing to see a hero that isn’t a wide-eyed, somehow-irradiated teenager or a trapeze artist, but a middle-aged borderline personality who creates his own solutions to his problems in the tradition of a Victorian gentleman scientist or a stranded explorer. Downey has the chops to do that, in the same way that Christian Bale can make Batman's troubles seem real but Ben Affleck - just as an example - could not. Downey retains the man behind the CGI mask, skirting the line in the way he does, between actorly gravity and comic madness. He is terrific; literally bullet-proof in the midst of the chaos and when similarly alone in his garage with his spanners and his pet robot. It’s mostly Downey that makes this breakneck adventure a film worth talking about.

While the story of betrayal and revenge is all about introducing the character, there are a couple of deeply satisfying action sequences carefully positioned to deliver adrenal jolts – Stark’s initial escape from the subterranean prison, a breakneck face-off between the airborne Iron Man and a couple of US fighter planes and a final stand against a superior force that sets Downey Jr and Favreau up for an already keenly anticipated sequel. Witty, daringly contemporary and blisteringly realised, Favreau’s action fantasy is a hugely entertaining special effects extravaganza and a welcome addition to the crowded panoply of American superhero movie characters.

Army Dreamers

Kimberly Pierce’s first film since her Oscar-winning Boys Don’t Cry is a brave attempt to dissect America at war by drawing it in microcosm, but one that trails Lions for Lambs, Rendition and Redacted in providing an ill-thought and overwrought analysis of why they are there and what they hope to achieve.

Speaking of Brian De Palma’s hopeless misfire Redacted, Stop-Loss opens in an almost identical manner, with a montage of faked home video and pounding metal music before settling on a checkpoint on an Iraqi road outside Tikrit, where a platoon of US troops are stationed. After a drive-by ambush, Staff Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) leads his squad in giving chase, following the insurgents into the town before engaging them in a vicious fire fight. King and his squad, including his childhood friend Sgt. Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum) are then shipped back to their hometown of Brazos, Texas to be greeted by the entire town on parade, including Shriver’s sweetheart Michelle (Abbie Cornish) and King’s salt of the earth parents (Linda Emond and Ciarán Hinds). King is awarded the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star by a visiting senator, for valour in combat, but he is just glad to be home and in one piece.

But there is no peace. When he goes to the local barracks to return his kit, King is told he isn’t finished yet. His commander gives him orders to report back to the Army in a week, to ship back out to Iraq, as part of the Stop-Loss programme – an initiative to retain soldiers on active duty beyond the terms of their original contract. King, unsurprisingly, doesn’t want to go back so he flees, getting into a car with Michelle and heading North to Washington to seek help from the senator that pinned the medals on his chest. Now AWOL, and in danger of being arrested and imprisoned, King makes the journey out of desperation, having no-one else to turn to but also out of anger, at himself and his friends, the mismanagement of the Army and the indifferent policies of the government. In the meantime, King’s friends Shriver and Tommy (the excellent Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are falling apart, unsure of what to do with themselves when not in fatigues, spending the time drinking too much and shooting off guns in the countryside.

Peirce, who co-wrote the script with Mark Richard, is sincere in her desire to take us inside the lives of the soldiers who enlisted after September 11^thbut where she excels in telling a story of men at war with an unknown enemy, she cannot generate the same level of drama in their battles with one another. The film also fails to discuss at any level the absence of any connection between the fall of the Twin Towers and Bush's assault on Saddam Hussein. Although beautifully photographed by Chris Menges and economically edited and scored, Stop-Loss fails to become the definitive film of these Iraq wars. Perhaps we won't see one for years.

Happy Out

Mike Leigh, the chronicler of British kitchen-sink misery in films like Vera Drake and Secrets & Lies, makes a graceful about-face with this endearing and optimistic story of a young primary school teacher learning how to drive.

Poppy (played by the marvellous Sally Hawkins) is a glass-half-full kind of girl, a single thirty-something who lives in a rented flat with her more cynical best friend Zoe (Alexis Zegerman) and loves her work at a local primary, where the kids adore her. She dresses to please herself, a riot of mismatched colours and cheap plastic jewellery, and talks off the top of her head in a sing-song ramble of blather, truisms and elbow-nudging encouragements. This being a Mike Leigh film, there isn’t much else in the way of a grand, over-arcing story or a schematic plot of events, the free-wheeling director preferring to amble among his characters and their relationships than impose upon them anything as restricting as a scripted narrative. It’s a hugely enjoyable meander, with the most charming of guides in the wide-eyed, open-minded Poppy.

The story proper starts when, as part of her efforts to grow up, Poppy starts taking driving lessons around the streets of London. Her instructor, Scott (Eddie Marsan) is the chalk to her cheese, a mean-spirited, almost silent bigot seething with all manner of ill-considered hatreds. The lessons, an hour every Saturday morning, are brilliantly executed comedy vignettes, witty and sharp and expertly played, that later give way to an insidious threat as Scott relaxes and starts expressing himself. Later, the young teacher takes a walk through the ruins of a factory where she has a strained conversation with a mad tramp (Stanley Townsend). It’s a scene that sits uneasily with the rest of the story, a moment of sobriety as the giggles stop but one that feels forced and carefully staged in contrast to the rest of the film.

And so it goes in this series of snapshots of this unique woman’s life; a flamenco lesson, a night on the town, an afternoon in a boat on a lake. At times, Leigh extends the moment to let us in further, like when Poppy challenges a child whose boisterousness has crossed over into bullying. Adopting her serious face, she deftly brings about a resolution in her own affably tender manner and in the process meets a man (Samuel Roukin), a children’s counsellor, who shares her eagerness to smile and takes her out on a couple of sweet, simple dates. In between, Polly takes her youngest sister (Kate O’Flynn) on a trip up the M1 to visit her uptight, heavily pregnant middle sister for a barbeque; a three piece suite of suburban embarrassments, simmering resentments and passive-aggressive confrontations told in miniature as a spiky commentary on how bland life on the outskirts can be, if you are primed to succumb.

Poppy is some ticket and Hawkins plays her brilliantly; her pixie head tilted to one side as she waits for enough of a lull in the conversation to drop another pleasantry. In other hands, Poppy could turn out to be deeply annoying, but Hawkins has the skill to only allow this to happen when it needs to. Even though Hawkins’ eyes betray hints of loneliness, this is a woman surrounded by people, family, friends, school kids and London itself. Love, when it finds her, banishes this creeping darkness, and we are glad of it. Characters like Poppy can’t be sad or conflicted, we couldn’t bear it. Happy-Go-Lucky is a lovely, lively comedy drama, the best British film since This Is England, with which it would make a fine double bill.

From The Vaults: Morgan Spurlock & Super Size Me

Ahead of the release of his funny and revealing new documentary, Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden?, here's an interview I did with gentleman adventurer, self-experimenter and documentarian Morgan Spurlock for Super Size Me back in September 2006.

Sometimes inspiration strikes in the most unlikely places. After packing away his mothers Thanksgiving dinner in November 2002, Morgan Spurlock was slumped on the couch watching TV with his belt unbuckled. On the evening news came a report about two girls in New York who were suing McDonald’s because, they claimed, eating their food had made them overweight and sick. At one point in the report, Spurlock remembers, a representative for the fast-food chain claimed their food was, in fact, nutritious. “When I first heard about the lawsuits I though the girls were crazy. They were going to sue a food company that sells us food, that we buy, that we choose to eat, and then blame that company for what happens to them. Then this spokesperson says, ‘Listen, you can’t link our food to these girls being sick, you can’t link our food to these girls being obese. Our food is healthy and nutritious, it’s good for you’. Well, I thought, if it’s that good for me, shouldn’t I be able to eat it for 30 days with no side effects? So that’s what I did”.

Given that Spurlock owns a production company, and had previously made shows for MTV, he decided to film his experiment. The result is Supersize Me, a darkly comic feature documentary, his first, that has gobbled up the column inches on both sides of the Atlantic and started a debate about nutrition and fast food that pressured McDonalds to phase out their ‘Super Size’ promotion in the US. “I just wanted to find out why Americans are so fat”, he says. Why then did he conduct the experiment on himself? “I realised as soon as I had the idea, that I couldn’t ask someone to do something I wouldn’t be willing to do myself. The other thing is I couldn’t be certain that the minute the cameras weren’t rolling, this person wouldn’t go home and be sneaking broccoli behind my back. It had to be 30 days, McDonalds three times a day, try everything on the menu at least once, and if the cashier asked me if I wanted to ‘Super Size’, I had to say yes.” The filmmaker admits his stunt is an "extreme experiment" but even the doctors he hires to record the impact of his new diet are shocked at how much damage a few weeks of burgers can do. The film is peppered with regular visits to the team of doctors and nutritionists, interviews with experts on fast food and chats with regular folk on the road, including a man who eats three Big Macs every day, but never has fries. We watch, amused and aghast as the formerly fit filmmaker eats everything in sight, packing on the pounds, and looking—and feeling—worse in each successive frame.

The volunteer guinea pig starts the movie as a very fit man in his early thirties with low cholesterol, a healthy heart and a perfectly functioning liver. He’s a charming, easygoing presence in the early part of the documentary, seemingly delighted with his good idea, and happily munching down the first day’s meals. He is soon completely out of control, as his mood swings from morbid depression to artificial elation as he sits around waiting for another sugar injection. His puzzled girlfriend, a vegan, complains about their flagging sex life as Spurlock’s gains 25lbs and his body fat grows from 11pc to 18pc. By day 21, Spurlock is waking up at night with heart palpitations, feels pressure on his chest during a short walk, and his worried mother and baffled doctors are pleading with him to give up the experiment. "Your liver is very sick. It is now like paté," says one wide-eyed doctor, scanning a blood test and desperately trying to persuade Spurlock to eat some vegetables. "These results are obscene beyond anything I would have thought," says another medical expert, who compares Spurlock's liver to that of a middle aged alcoholic. Spurlock, now with his health restored, explains. “In the movie, when I would eat the food, shortly afterwards I’d be famished. This food is so devoid of any nutritional value. My doctors told me I was getting less than half of the vitamins and minerals I needed. I love the idea that McDonalds say their food should be eaten as part of a balanced diet. What part is that? This food doesn’t give your body what it needs, so your body is still craving food.”

I put it to him that he strongly suggests in the film that he became addicted to this food. “Yeah”, he says, “I believe that if you eat a lot of fat, a lot of sugar, and you’re eating things that aren’t giving your body what it needs, it’ll want more.” In the film, it appears that Spurlock is in the grip of an almost psychological addiction. He is so low, so depressed, that he only feels better after he has eaten. He agrees. “Absolutely, towards the end of the month I was so tired and so unhappy. I started to get very depressed about a week in. I’d get these massive headaches, but the minute I ate they’d go away, which is incredible to think about. The migraines got worse and I got more lethargic as the depression spiraled deeper. My blood tests showed a huge spike in my cholesterol, my liver was basically dying. Very scary. Ultimately, at my lowest point, the enzymes my liver was putting out to deal with this had increased 2000%.”

I ask him about his diet before this. Was it all tofu and wheatgrass shakes? He laughs, “No, I’m not a zealot, I’m someone who loves a great cheeseburger, and I’d eat one once or twice a month, no problem”. How did he feel coming to the end of the month? It’s no exaggeration to say he looked absolutely terrible. “You summed it up right there, buddy. I was so unhappy, so thankful that the experiment was almost over, and dying for this diet to end. I felt really sick, never felt as low in my life. I’m a very gregarious, outgoing person, so for me, to hit the mental, physical and emotional wall so hard was really difficult. We live every day not thinking about what we’re eating, piling it on, and we don’t think about how this stuff, salt, sugar, fat all adds up”.

McDonalds are calling him an extremist attention seeker who deliberately hurt himself to further his documentary career. While he had them on the rack, why didn’t he take a look at their employment policies, or their environmental record? He didn’t go down the Michael Moore road because, he says, the film isn’t just about McDonalds. “For me it’s much more about the diet. I wanted to look at the impact of their food on your health. A lot of that political material was covered in Eric Schlosser’s book ‘Fast Food Nation’. Why wasn’t Schlosser in the documentary? “We wanted to interview him, Spurlock explains, but he was busy promoting his new book, ‘Reefer Madness’ at the time. Thankfully, I was able to sit down with Eric a few weeks ago and we shot an interview for the DVD, so people will be able to get more information from his book. I tell everyone who has seen my movie to read it”.

Were there scenes he had to cut from the documentary that might turn up on the DVD? “There are a couple of troubling scenes where we go into an Overeaters Anonymous, which is a group of people who believe they have food addiction, food problems. They are all very overweight. For them to tell us their stories was incredible, these stories are so heart-wrenching, to hear about these people who from a young age would cover their emotions and sadness with food.” I ask him if he felt that the OE meeting scenes were moralizing? “Yeah, it was important to me not to make a preachy film, that tells you how to live your life, but presented you with a picture that gave you enough information so that you’d go home and think about what you’ve seen. People tell me they walk out saying they need to take better care of themselves, to pay attention to what they eat and how they live. Parents are saying I need to cook more at home, be a better food role model. People are not walking out saying, I’m getting a lawyer and I’m suing McDonalds tomorrow, thank goodness, because that’s not what the movie is about.”

Although Spurlock only eats at McDonalds, the documentary is not meant as an attack on the company. Spurlock says it could have been any fast food chain. “For me, it’s about the culture. If you think fast food as an American, you think McDonalds. To me they represent every food chain you can think of. They have influenced every other chain, they all follow McDonalds business practices. It’s follow the leader, McDonalds came out with ‘Super Sizing’ in America, everyone else followed suit. I picked the company that in my mind, could most easily institute change across the board, if they wanted to.”

What was the most surprising thing he uncovered about the industry? “For me, the most terrifying thing in the whole film is the impact and influence these companies wield in American schools. What we are feeding kids in schools is terrible, unbelievable. Why are the kids getting fat and sick? What are we ‘teaching’ our kids? The message is, ‘You don’t need to exercise’, PE has been eliminated from schools, so the kids get no exercise. Health classes have been dropped from schools. Then we send them to lunch, and they’re set loose in the middle of a fast food wonderland, filled with burgers and chips and sodas and ice cream and candy bars. Every day, 5 days a week for 15 years of their lives. The message is, it’s ok to eat this every day. My message is that it’s not ok at all. We have a generation of overweight, obese children who are actually malnourished.

Spurlock is currently preparing a classroom-friendly version of the film to be released on a special DVD with accompanying educational material, and will take it on a tour of American schools later this year. He is also preparing a book for next year, exploring issues raised in the film. “Yeah, I’ve just started working on that, it’ll be out next year. It’ll dive in a lot more into the whole issue, and deal with it in a fun way, much like I did in the movie” So what’s the message, the one point he wants us to hear? “Super Size Me is a funny movie, and a challenging one. It’s about corporate responsibility and individual responsibility. McDonalds says they're doing their part to change things. Now their customers have to do their part. People who go to these stores need to realise what they're putting into their mouths."

Obesity is second only to smoking as a preventable cause of death in the US, making it an increasingly important political issue. All of the world’s major fast food companies are American. So is the documentary more about America than fatty burgers? Spurlock agrees. “For me, the film isn’t really about McDonalds at all; it’s about this fast food lifestyle that we live every day in America. We are consistently turning to these restaurants to be the cornerstone of our diet. 50% of American meals are eaten outside the home. That’s an immense number of meals, so home cooking is vanishing, and this lifestyle is permeating American culture, but now we’ve franchised it out – to Ireland to Europe, to the rest of the world”. I tell him we probably didn’t really want it. His retort is that American companies don’t usually ask permission. “As much as my film is a wakeup call for America, it’s a bigger wake-up call to Europe, where the problem hasn’t yet gotten as bad as it is in the States.”

Chuckleheads

In the period comedy Leatherheads, George Clooney plays Dodge Connolly, the middle-aged captain of an American football team on the verge of bankruptcy in the midst of the Great Depression. Decades before the Superbowl and multi-million dollar contracts, the professional game is an outsider pursuit, played by a ragbag crew of coalminers and demobbed soldiers on cow pastures in front of a handful of disinterested spectators. The real game is played at college level, where the brightest star in the firmament is Princeton’s war-hero Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski). Desperate to save his team, and avoid going back to real life, Dodge persuades Carter, and his slick manager C. C. Frazier (Jonathan Pryce), to sign up for the team, teach them some new tricks and save the franchise by drawing huge crowds.

Complications arrive in the trim form of Chicago journalist Lexie Littleton (Renée Zellweger), an ambitious writer dispatched by her editor to investigate Carter’s claims of battlefield valour after a former comrade exposes him as an opportunistic fraud. Soon Lexie has both men in a flap as she trails the team across the country, spitting out machine-gun witticisms, squinting suspiciously and brandishing her irrepressible moxie.

Leatherheads isn’t a bad premise for a screwball comedy and it is clear that Clooney has gone to considerable effort to bring it to the screen; taking hefty dollops of inspiration from classics like It Happened One Night and The Philadelphia Story, adding an emphatically jazzy score from Randy Newman and peppering his cast with lumpy 20s faces. Nothing wrong with any of that, either. Furthermore, the influence of the Coen Brothers on his cinematic thinking is obvious from the opening frames; a little of O, Brother’s sepia-tinted glow and more of Hudsucker’s pin-sharp tailoring and rat-a-tat dialogue. Again, nothing amiss in that. But none of that matters, in the end because no matter how the director and his cinematographer, Thomas Sigel do to make Leatherheads look authentic, it never feels right; the beat is off, the momentum flags.

After a bright, tight first act, the film gradually loses focus and heft, wandering aimlessly around the marked boundaries of the story before congealing into a pastiche of Golden Age adventurism and then attempting to revive itself for a grandstand sporting finale. A long scene which has the main players trapped in a room thrashing out a complicated compromise hangs flat on the screen; Clooney perched in a corner waiting for his moment to waggle his eyebrows in triumph when he should be behind the camera, making it better.

The cynic might see the whole shiny effort as a complex delivery system for a tutorial in movie-star charm, duly delivered by the closest thing we have to Cary Grant nowadays, but the lumpy, tedious results are far less bewitching than Clooney would have wanted. Both sport and movies, according to Clooney, were better before the marketers and the regulators got involved; amateur football played by adventure-seeking privateers, movies made by fast-talking, wit-slinging daredevils. In the good old days, blithe talents like Clarke Gable and Jean Arthur made it look easy, but making good movies is never easy. Capra and Wilder, Hawks and Cukor made magic through certainty of purpose and hard graft at the typewriter. Clooney’s heart is in the right place, but no amount of clever homage, genuine affection or old-fashioned tenacity can make up for a dull script and an inattentive presentation.

Roland Emmerich & 10,000 B.C.

Roland Emmerich thinks big. The German director, neat and trim in a petrol blue suit and an incongruous pair of matching Converse sneakers, is a man with a grand vision. “I am happiest when I am shooting a movie that was all created by me. I think that only when you are all three; originator, producer and finally director, can the film be successful. It’s about power”.

With his new movie, the prehistoric adventure 10,000 BC, Emmerich is indeed credited as co-writer, producer and director. That's pow-wah, as he might say himself in his heavily accented English. I ask him whether he thinks in terms of words, spreadsheets or pictures and he laughs. “All three again”, he says, “but it always comes back to the concept. I got the idea for this film when I saw a documentary about mammoth hunting and how our early ancestors would have hunted these huge animals. From that original spark, it’s a long process until the day we start shooting, but once you have the idea and you believe in it, it’s the perfect start”.

In 10,000 BC, a young hunter from a struggling tribe (played by Steven Strait) leads a vast army across an enormous desert to rescue the woman he loves (Camilla Belle) from slavery, battling a menagerie of toothy prehistoric creatures along the way. The film is typically Emmerich in its sense of scale and dedication to thrills, the story playing second fiddle to the spectacle. So, from the initial idea, did 10,000 BC turn out like he envisioned? “I start out with a movie in my head, but that movie can never be made? How could you do that?” he asks himself. “There is compromise every step of the way, on every aspect of the film. You always end up with a different film, but you work very hard to stay true to the overall vision. Things go because of time and budget.” He waves them away with a flick of his hand. “But sometimes, it can work out better than you imagined. We got heavy snowfall on location and that was definitely not part of the plan, but I had no choice but to work with it and I love it now”.

Snow in the desert, I say, that must have been difficult to stage-manage? “Tell me about it”, Emmerich replies, “this was the hardest movie I’ve made so far, because we shot 98% of it outside, on location in the desert, in all kinds of weather. Madness, ja? We were battling the elements and the location, re-writing whole scenes in our little trailer in this blizzard”. Emmerich taps frantically on the tabletop in front of him. “Then the snow would melt, naturally, and we’d be back in the trailer, type type type!”

Even though his self-consciously epic film is entirely invented, Emmerich was determined to deliver honest thrills when it came to the prehistoric monsters. “We took a lot of liberties with the timeline and the characters but the animals are super accurate. A sabre toothed tiger really was that big. They have found these simply enormous skulls. Terrifying. And the mammoths were terribly powerful and so, so dangerous. We took time over that and we did a lot of research to make those creatures as realistic as possible. Everything else is a fantasy, but you know, I don’t pretend to be making documentaries”. He laughs heartily to himself at the very idea. “As a film director, my job is to tell an entertaining story.”

Pyramids feature strongly in the second half of 10,000 BC, when the searchers come across a huge stone city built beside a river, where tens of thousands of enslaved workers are building a massive structure in the desert. Earlier, Emmerich had mentioned in passing a lost, ancient civilisation, so I asked him what is it about these pseudo-historical mysteries that fires his imagination? “I believe that these early pyramid builders lived alongside early man, for a long time. There are tantalizing hints in the archaeological record. Only the three pyramids of Giza were claimed by the ancient Egyptians, nobody knows for sure who built the others. Around that time and place, there are so many amazing discrepancies. The Sphinx has water marks high up on the stone that were created in 7,000 BC. Did you know that the pyramids are aligned to the star map of Orion, as it was 12,000 years ago? Isn’t that fascinating? Why would they do that and how? Those are interesting questions to me.”

I make the observation that his obsession with ancient Egypt goes all the way back to his second American studio film, the sci-fi adventure Stargate. “Oh, it goes back further than that”, he replies. I remember being 17 years old and standing in front of these extraordinary structures in Cairo. The pyramids have this otherworldly, timeless quality. They are incredibly simple but also deeply complex and mysterious. The experience of being there has stayed with me all my life, and it informs my thinking still.” I go on to say that the two films also share the same science-fiction idea that this ancient society was ruled by alien gods, but Emmerich stops me. “They’re not really gods in 10,000 BC. The leader of the pyramid-builders is from beyond the ocean, not the stars. We never use the word, but I always thought of this king as coming from Atlantis, you know, with advanced technologies for building and making war, those huge ships, that level of organization”.

Another common theme running through Emmerich’s films, and it’s fair to say, a lot of American studio movies, is the relationships between fathers and sons. “Oh, yes”, says Emmerich, “and you know what, I am told it’s in almost every movie I have made but I only realised it for myself when I made my last movie, The Day After Tomorrow. I’m not doing it on purpose, it’s just how these stories turn out, and I really cannot explain it. I had a very good relationship with my own father, who died two years ago, so it’s really not a personal thing.” For Emmerich, regardless of the time and place, the far past or the distant future, the same elemental rules of storytelling apply. “I think it started at the time of this movie, around the camp fire, the first beginnings of the myth of the hero which is the same one we have today. We knew we were writing a hero myth, an old-fashioned story of a selfless man taking responsibility for others. We were thinking the same way when writing the character of Old Mother, who can see visions of the future. Heroes and oracles are basic and ancient parts of telling stories”.

Story aside, Emmerich is best known for his extravagant special effects sequences; huge and hugely expensive scenes that punctuate his films with thrills. Some of his most spectacular moments, like blowing up the White House or flooding New York, have become classic moments in popcorn cinema. He has always wanted to make big, bold statements. “My very first film in Berlin Film School was a science fiction movie with lots of special effects called The Noah's Ark Principle, about weather control. It was on a much cheaper budget, naturally, but the effects were as good as I could make them. Everybody else had two guys talking about philosophy in a small room, but not me. It’s fun to do something that nobody’s ever seen before. Even though I know how the trick is done, I still see the magic even now.”

I tell him that I couldn’t imagine an Emmerich movie as a dialogue-driven chamber piece and he leans forward to tell a story. “My ideas of film are a reaction to what was happening when I was growing up in Germany. I’m 53 now and when I was coming of age, all you could see were Wim Wenders and Fassbinder films, what they called the New Cinema. I couldn’t relate to them, that kind of film didn’t interest me at all. I was drawn to movies like ET or Star Wars or anything by John Carpenter. I saw Close Encounter of the Third Kind in Paris, when I was a student. I was already in film school, but I really wanted to be a production designer. Spielberg blew me completely away. I came out and for the first time I thought, ‘I want to be a director’”.

Emmerich made his name in Hollywood with his first four studio films, science-fiction adventures like Universal Soldier, Stargate and the global blockbuster Independence Day. Since then, the director has enjoyed mixed fortunes; the costly and attention-seeking failure of his Godzilla remake would have been enough to destroy any career. Emmerich found the taint of the giant Japanese mutant lizard a hard one to shake off and the silence that followed its release brought about a re-think in his approach to the business. The director is unusual in that he funds the pre-production on all of his films from his own pocket, before selling them to studios, fully formed. “I am an outsider in Hollywood now” he says. “The normal way of doing things is to wait for the phone to ring or a script to arrive. I have my own creative process and I like to be in control. I make the decisions and I take the risks. When I think it’s ready, I present it to the studio. That’s how I like it and luckily, most of the time, it works out.”

When I ask him about his next film 2012, he advises me to “go check the internet”. When I gently press him for more detail, he laughs and says when the idea came to him last year, the first thing he did was turn go online for information. “It’s about this ancient Mayan prophesy that says that in 2012 the world will face a huge change. All I’ll say is that it is a disaster movie. I’m not telling you anything more”. Another disaster? What is the fascination with killing us all off? “Well, it’s nothing personal, you know, but it's not just my obsession. The fear of witnessing the end of the world is a universal phenomenon. It’s there in all people, all cultures. I really hope it doesn’t happen”, he says with another laugh, “but if it does, I can always say, ‘I told you so!’.”

Cholera Me Bad

Director Mike Newell deserves a tip of the hat for bringing Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s long-thought unfilmable novel Love in the Time of Cholera to the screen at all, but given the quivering mess that results, perhaps the book was best categorized as being too deep for the cheap seats.

In Columbia at the turn of the last century, a young man named Florentino (Javier Bardem) falls in love, at first sight, with the beautiful Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). New to the town, she is guarded jealously by her merchant father (John Leguizamo), who wishes her to marry a wealthy man and gain respectability. Shy Florentino, prodded by his clucking mother, starts to write elaborate love-letters to his beloved, hiding them around the town. But on the day he was to ask for her hand in marriage, her father finds out about the affair, and sends Fermina to the mountains to live with her cousin Hildebranda (Catalina Sandino Moreno). The young couple’s untried love cannot survive the separation, and years later when Fermina returns, she has moved on. After a short courtship, conducted over her sick-bed, she marries the local doctor (Benjamin Bratt). Distraught, Florentino throws himself into a lengthy series of casual affairs, noting each new conquest in a little black book, but his heart remains forever unrequited.

Javier Bardem, who won the Oscar for his unforgettable Anton Chigurh in another literary adaptation, No Country For Old Men, does well initially with his disappointed suitor, his flat, steam-iron face and drooping eyes communicating an endless well of lovelorn misery. Later, however, Florentino loses our sympathy; a combination of his innate selfishness, laughable make-up and narrative tedium. Mezzogiorno, for all her early spirit and flashes of vulnerability, suffers a similar fate, established as a romantic ideal and then abandoned in the story as a prop.

The film is well photographed in that lush, golden light of the tropics, but Newell cannot find any poetry in his imagery. His production is handsome, but unremarkable. His pacing is steady but too slow. The absence of touch reduces the romance to a train of connectable developments, a slowly deadening trawl through one man’s self-absorption, buoyed occasionally by moments of lively smut and delicate absurdity. But for each of the few bright, honest moments in this sprawling timeline, there are long sections of awkward soap opera, over-cooked landscape photography or blank-eyed mooning.

Newell and his screenwriter Ronald Harwood have taken this classic of magic realism and somewhere along the way, forgotten the magic. Perhaps it got lost in the desire to cram the best of a fabulously complicated story into a running time just shy of two and a half hours. It could be the distractingly unconvincing make-up techniques used to age the actors fifty years. Maybe it’s the clumsy dialogue or the evaporating secondary cast (including Liev Schreiber, briefly), who come and go in the background without registering. In the end, it might be just the fundamental, literary nature of the source material. Any one of these problems would have damaged the film. All of them together scuttle it completely.

A Week On The Wild Side

Playwright Martin McDonagh makes his feature debut with this startlingly dark comedy drama about a pair of inept hitmen sent to cool their boots in Belgium after a contract killing goes awry. McDonagh, who won an Oscar for his short film Six Shooter and has armfuls of awards for his stage dramas, brings all of his considerable talents to this determinedly entertaining story, which might trail a long tradition of cinematic criminal capers, but is a true original, being smart, twisted, funny and fierce. In Bruges is some trip.

After the London job goes belly-up, Ken and Ray (Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell) are ordered by their boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes) to the small, quaint and out-of-the-way town of Bruges to lay low. Ken is delighted to get the chance to wander around the medieval town; taking a trip down the canal and rooting around the old cathedrals. Ray, on the other hand, is bored senseless, looking for something to do that doesn’t involve a guidebook. Eventually, he meets the pretty, savvy Chloe (Clémence Poésy), an assistant on an arty film being shot in the town that stars the irascible dwarf Jimmy (Jordan Prentice). Soon, Bruges seems like a lot more fun, as the two lads get involved in a few low-key scrapes, but there are black clouds on the horizon as Harry comes looking for answers and pay-back.

In Bruges is comedy written in shades of midnight, the bumbling to-and-fro of the interaction between the leads and the surreal idiocy of their situation gradually giving way to something approaching desperation, a panicky, fleshy sense of capture underlined by the synchronicities and ironies in McDonagh’s beautifully considered script. For all the twitching nerve endings and splashes of crimson gore, there are bright beams of precisely worded humour and, later, a gracious tenderness approaching a father and son bond in the relationship between Gleeson and Farrell.

Both leads are exceptional. We have come to expect it from Gleeson; his bluff, straight-edged ordinariness and his fluid command of his lumbering body, topped with his motile, agreeable face. Farrell, though, has a lesser recent pedigree but the younger actor overcomes a decidedly shaky start here to deliver one of the best performances of his career, being likeable, honest and unexpectedly witty. Later, as Ray’s story develops, Farrell goes to a sad, lonely place and faces it with extraordinary bravery. He’s really good here. Really.

McDonagh’s script unfolds in a distinct and deceptively unhurried series of revelations, finely handled plot movements placed in a constant flow of word-heavy dialogue scenes. Later, when a moment of silence descends, McDonagh creeps in to fill the frame with his faces and lets these portraits sit. The emotional effect is unsettling and brings about a nimble change in tone as the 'lads-on-tour' mood falls away. The film is strikingly photographed in these composed compositions by Eigil Bryld, giving way to a series of nimble chases. These later sections, heralded by the arrival of the snarling Harry, are carefully - perhaps too carefully - positioned as a series of dramatic synchronicities and referential ironies, but these are minor quibbles in what is a hugely entertaining film.

Blood And Fire

Nobody says anything for the opening fifteen minutes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s monstrous epic There Will Be Blood. There is no need. Over the first clanging notes of Johnny Greenwood’s discordant score, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis) swings a pickaxe deep underground, chipping away at a thin seam of gold, the exertion etched on his face. Then, an accident, and Plainview must drag himself out of his pit and crawl back to town. The first theme of this extraordinary film is established – the earth is filled with treasures, for the man strong enough to extract them.

As he will do throughout, Anderson then brings us forward a couple of years to the late 1870s, where Plainview has converted his few ounces of hard-won gold into an oil prospect. There in the desert, with a few swarthy riggers, he makes his first strike – his raw hand covered in the blood-black oil, raised triumphant over his head, a powerfully simple image that calls to mind Kubrick’s hooting apes, champions of their own prehistoric wasteland, giddy with the thrill of discovery.

Now suited and booted, Plainview hones his tactics, adopting a young orphan HW (played with uncanny calm by Dillon Freasier) to establish himself as a family man, and with the help of his lieutenant Fletcher (Ciarán Hinds), builds his business throughout the West. One evening, Plainview is visited by a young man who tells him, for a fee, about a place where the oil is seeping out of the ground. With H.W. in tow, Plainview sets out, camping at the run-down Sunday family farm under the pretence of hunting quail. Soon he has bought the land, and the land around it and (in a scene largely improvised by Day Lewis) met with the townspeople and convinced them of his good name, his good intentions and promised them prosperity and happiness. Plainview has a master plan, to become independent of the oil distributors by buying all the land from the wells to the Pacific and building his own pipeline. His empire is nearly set, but he faces an opponent from the other side of the divide, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) a young firebrand preacher with a mission to bring God to the people of California. Sunday doesn’t trust Plainview but needs his donations to build his church, the first roots of a complex and destructive relationship that Anderson, with consummate skill and remarkable economy, establishes as a living, breathing contest, between the emptiness of God and the fruitless pursuit of Money, fought by two compromised, untrustworthy men.

Then, a series of incidents that bring us forward through the narrative. H.W. is injured in a derrick explosion and is cruelly sent away by his father to school in San Francisco. A man arrives at camp, claiming to be Plainview’s half-brother. A farmer, whose land stands between Plainview and the sea, refuses to sell. The preacher gradually builds his congregation, and sets himself against the oil man. In an exceptional year for cinema, this film stands proudly beside the Coen Brother’s No Country For Old Men as exemplars of today’s American cinema and shares with that masterwork the idea that money, and the pursuit of it, corrupts even the strongest of us. More than that, both films look to address the American character writ large through the notion of ‘finders keepers’ established by the first European settlers and distorted through the centuries by acquisition, accumulation and the pursuit of individual greed. In drilling his way to success, Plainview isn’t just chipping away at the ground; he is excavating himself.

There is so much more to say. Last week, Day Lewis won an Oscar for his performance, the finest of his career and one of the most exceptional in the history of cinema. He is in almost every scene and you cannot take your eyes off him, his fierce fighter’s stance and his rolling, soothing voice. The photography from Robert Elswit, another Oscar winner, is breath-taking in its simplicity, its sense of scale, composition and colour. Anderson corrals it all into an undying work of inestimable genius, in front of and behind the camera; a dangerous, daring film that you simply must see.

Barclay's Bankers

Although the opening credits of Roger Donaldson’s late-to-the-party cockney crime caper herald The Bank Job as being ‘based on a true story’, it is a yarn spun almost completely from whole cloth. Yes, in 1971 an daring gang of London criminals burrowed into the vault of Lloyds Bank in London’s affluent Marylebone and made off with more than half a million pounds of loot. And yes, their walkie-talkie chatter was overheard by a nearby radio ham, leading to their capture. But they were there for the money, having spotted a flaw in the bank’s security system, not to return compromising photographs of a royal princess to MI5 or snare a violent black civil rights leader as the script from veteran sit-com double act Dick Clement and Ian Lafrenais would have you believe. Likewise, shadowy corners of the secret service did not intervene on the criminal’s behalf and allow them to escape scot free, the robbers were quickly caught and all served lengthy prison sentences.

Isn’t the truth tiresome? Well, fiction in this case is barely more exciting. Assembled from the dog-ends of countless previous iterations of the same standardised geezer text and executed without a modicum of invention or heart by Donaldson, The Bank Job gathers a cast of mid-range British talents to grind through the motions without ever giving a convincing reason for having done so. Small-time criminal Terry Leather (Jason Statham) is in debt to the shady Mr. Jessell (Trevor Byfield), whose strong-armed gorilla’s force Terry into considering a complicated criminal proposition from his old flame Martine (Saffron Burrows) that promises a big pay day. Terry gets his old gang back together, recruiting photographer Kevin (Stephen Campbell Moore), former porn star Dave (Daniel Mays) and fake posh gent Guy (James Faulkner), to help put the job in motion. At the same time, we discover the nasty establishment puppeteers, who are worse than the bad guys, including MI5 maven Miles Urquhart (Peter Bowles), who has his lackey Tim (Richard Lintern) do his dirty work for him.

The simplistic, ponderous treatment – set-up, execution, aftermath - doesn’t give Donaldson much room for invention and his blundering, uneven film struggles to find pace, particularly in the dreary opening sections. Worse still, after a decade or more of copycat British gangster movies, The Bank Job lacks any element of style, novelty or surprise. With the story sketched in broad strokes, the actors struggle with the lack of any real characterisation beyond their wide-lapelled costumes and elaborate hairdos. Statham is a stereotype specialist, but growling through his short range of granite-jawed stares isn’t enough to convince here. Opposite him, Burrows wafts prettily through an underwritten, procedural part without a real moment of distinction. Keely Hawes flares momentarily as Leather’s tired wife but without more to do, is forgotten in the subsequent melee of cliché and cardboard tension. The rest of the gang appear to have wandered in from an entirely different film, Carry On Blowing The Bloody Doors Off, maybe. Well before the end, the film falls away to nothing; a limp rethread that is as economical with inspiration as it is with the truth.

Stop! Or My Grandad Will Shoot

Following his creaking return to the ring for 2006’s geriatric Rocky Balboa, Sylvester Stallone scours his dwindling back catalogue to bring us another preposterously violent Rambo, an unrequested follower-upper that arrives twenty years down the line from his trilogy of Cold War action movies, to a changed cinematic world.

The Soviets are gone now, even Castro has retired, and so, seeking a simple backdrop for his blood-lust, the sixty-odd Stallone pitches up in Northern Thailand, next door to Burma, where a civil war has raged for sixty years. John Rambo, the post-traumatic Green Beret, has a job snaring cobras for the local snake-handling show, and lives alone on a river boat were he spends his evenings perfecting his thousand yard stare while revisiting his past in a series of moody montages. Like Bogart in Casablanca, Rambo hides his righteous anger behind a set mask of cynical indifference, but when a troupe of gospel-quoting do-gooders arrive on the dock requesting he take them across the river to do their good works in Burma, the façade cracks.

Or at least I think it does. It’s hard to tell with Stallone. In any event, when the dangerous crossing goes wrong and the Christians are captured by the evil Military Junta, Rambo vows to rescue them. Mumbling wildly about right and wrong, Rambo hammers a machete out of scrap iron and straps his trademark bow and arrow across his now-flabby back before setting out. Over a thudding score of ominous kettle-drums, he transports a crack squad of grizzled ex-SAS mercenaries into the danger-zone, where he hangs around long enough to watch them make their first mistake and affect a rescue that proves his worth to the mission.

All this takes maybe twenty minutes and none of it is new or particularly interesting. But, from this point on, Stallone’s film degenerates into a red soup of eye-watering violence, more a training aid for military surgeons than any classification of entertainment. As a director, Stallone has only a basic grasp of storytelling and lacks any insight into character but he knows how to stage a massacre. Once he starts, he doesn’t stop. Rambo contains 236 separate depictions of death, more than two per minute and none from natural causes. We see children stabbed with bayonets, grenades turning people into an abstraction of limbs, lingering disembowelments, bombings, strangulations and coup de theatre flamethrower roasting. For the big finish, Rambo straps himself on to a machine gun and bisects the advancing hoards of soldiers that stand between him and his allies in twenty minute battle scene that redefines bombast.

Ignoring for a moment his film’s basic ugliness and passing over it’s indebtedness to Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Stallone would have us believe that his intention in making another Rambo was to highlight the genocide of the Burmese people by the ruling military junta. In fact, he attempts to make the case against slaughter by shamelessly staging a slaughter, and a particularly senseless one. Although the mumbling Stallone might think he is being clever, using real-life news footage of last year’s protest by Buddhist monks as an overture and speechifying about the 60 year civil war, his base film is pornographically stupid; a dreary, chest-puffing exercise in jingoistic carnage hiding behind a unconvincing human-rights platform.

The Kindness of Weirdos

French director Michel Gondry’s heart-warming and very funny Be Kind, Rewind, the latest in his series of high-concept capers that come wrapped in distinctly low-fidelity packaging, is a story of creativity and self-actualisation buried in the to-and-fro of a mismatched buddy comedy.

In a run-down side-street in Passaic, New Jersey, Mike (Mos Def) works at the titular video library, owned by Mr Fletcher (Danny Glover) and said to be the building that jazz legend Fats Waller was born in. Nevertheless, the Passaic town fathers want to tear the place down and build a nice row of apartments. While Mr Fletcher goes away for a week in an effort to modernise and save the business, Mike is warned not to let his accident-prone best pal Jerry (Jack Black) anywhere near the shop. Jerry, however, is unstoppable and soon has Mike recruited for his mission to sabotage a local power station which he thinks is infecting his mind with cosmic rays. The mission goes badly, Jerry is magnetized and inadvertently blanks all of the shop’s VHS cassettes.

Not wanting to put his kindly boss out of business, Mike convinces Jerry to help his shoot an improvised, hand-made remake of a wiped Ghostbusters tape, to keep regular customer Miss Falewicz off the scent. Their hilarious ten-minute epic proves popular with their customers, so the two enlist the help of Alma (Melonie Diaz) and Wilson (Irv Gooch) to make more “sweded” takes on classic video-library shelf-stock. Their guerrilla versions of Rush Hour II, Driving Miss Daisy and Robocop, made on a cheap video camera and produced with whatever they have lying around the shop, are a hit, the boys become local celebrities and the rental business is booming.

Although the story flirts with classic clichés (from Abbot & Costello to Blackbeard's Ghost) Gondry is too clever to allow his characters to fall into whimsy. His film, a swipe against globalisation and standardisation, soon settles into a comedy of old-fashioned community values and the eventual triumph of the little guy. It cannot last, of course, and reality bites when a snippy lawyer (Sigourney Weaver) arrives to shut the operation down, citing long reams of copyright law, the same legalese that features at the end of Be Kind's credits, incidentally.

Typically a film with a left-field conceptual base and built around an inherently wobbly structure will start out sturdy and slowly, inevitably, collapse. Here that noticeable second-act fizzling out is reignited by flashes of visual genius and hard-won emotional credibility. Gondry stages a series of uplifting, spirit-affirming moments that are smartly threaded through his themes of creativity, community and doing-it-for-yourself, and combine for a fine, fluent ending.

Monkey Puzzle

Shouty, wiggy Nicolas Cage reprises his patented ‘where-are-my-car-keys?’ furrow for National Treasure: Book Of Secrets, a daft quasi-historical adventure sequel that dispatches the treasure hunting Ben Gates to Yurp on a mission to clear his great-granddaddy’s name before returning him for a flag-waving conclusion underneath Mount Rushmore.

When we first meet Cage’s Gates, he is living with his historian father (Jon Voight), having been kicked out of the unfeasible mansion he shared with girlfriend Abigail (Diane Kruger). When slit-eyed Southern treasure hunter Wilkinson (Ed Harris) delivers seemingly incontrovertible proof that a Gates was involved in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Ben and Dad spring to defend their ancestral honour by assiduously following a trail of bewildering clues around the sight-seeing spots of Paris and London, before pitching up back in Washington, kidnapping the President (Bruce Greenwood) for his secret book and following more clues that lead to a Lost City of Gold beneath the carved monument.

Without a moment of genuine wit or a pause for breath, the film immediately descends to the level of a chase, or rather a gallop, through history and over intellect. Cage contains his inner ham adequately enough for the film’s few quiet moments, but eventually unleashes himself during a bug-eyed rant on a stairs inside Buckingham Palace, where a vital clue has been hidden in the furniture. He jigs his way through the rest of the story, flailing his arms and laughing maniacally, casually embracing self-parody. In comparison, Voight and Kruger are models of restraint, existing only to offer supporting moments of well-heralded a-ha! Justin Bartha returns with a mandate to deliver intentional comic relief in the form of pratfalls and come-uppances, while Helen Mirren pops up later as Gates’ estranged mother to offer assistance in her capacity as a handy expert on Incan carving. Pushed even further into the background is Harvey Keitel as FBI Agent Sadusky, who misses umpteen opportunities to put a deserving bullet through Cage and let us all go home.

Screenwriting team Cormac and Marianne Wibberley appear to have concocted their script by arranging a series of high-tempo chases, joining them with clunky scenes enabled by squinting at hieroglyphics or clicking on shiny technologies and then vaguely wafting a history book somewhere nearby. It doesn’t help that their inevitable sequel is essentially the same film as its predecessor but with new locations and extra helpings of hysterics. Returning director Jon Turteltaub executes a procession of by-the-numbers set-pieces with the same bare minimum of originality or style. With a running time that whistles past two hours and a storyline that defeats even the most careful attention, there is far too much of National Treasure, especially considering it runs completely flat in the last half hour. I stuck it out to the end but never discovered why the ancient Incans buried their loot under the very distant Mt Rushmore, an arduous hike when encumbered by tons of gold but a stroll on the beach in comparison to watching this.

Kooky Monster

Arriving on a wave of internet-derived hype, Alias and Lost creator JJ Abrams crosses Godzilla with The Blair Witch Project to bring us Cloverfield, a hugely entertaining post-9/11 monster movie that mostly lives up to it’s breathless chat-room billing.

Opening with an official-looking title card, stamped Department of Defence and making ominous reference to ‘the area formerly known as Central Park’, the story starts with a going-away party for Rob (Michael Stahl-David), who is off to take a job in Japan. His pal Hud (TJ Miller) is videoing the revellers, including brother Jason (Mike Vogel), Lily (Jessica Lucas), Marlena (Lizzy Caplan) and Beth (Odette Yustman). Suddenly, without warning, the lights flicker, the ground shakes and the crowd hear an enormous roar. They arrive on the street just in time to see the head of the Statue of Liberty flying towards them. Something is causing chaos down town, and it’s time to start running.

Shot throughout from the hand-held point of view of Hud, the fleeing survivor, the frame is constantly in motion, a blur of jerks and shakes that is occasionally too much to watch. The restless camera isn’t the only thing that might make the viewer feel queasy, the constant visual references to 9/11 – collapsed skyscrapers, streets filled with bloodied people fleeing billowing clouds of dust – are indelicately evoked and clumsily subversive. Seven years on from the event, what looked like a disaster movie has become one, made even more effective by the unbroken illusion that we are witnessing events as they happen, in real time.

Director Matt Reeves and producer Abrams cleverly cast their film with virtual unknowns, adding another level of realism at the cost of any nuance in the performances themselves. None of the characters are particularly well developed, but there really isn’t time. A further inspired decision is to delay the introduction of the monster itself. We see the devastation the beast wreaks, hear its ultrasonic roar and catch tantalising glimpses between crumbling buildings until, late in the game, it fills the frame. Its origins remain unexplained, although the closing credits offer hints of a sequel that might fill out the backstory.

Barring documentary, all cinema requires some suspension of disbelief in order to be enjoyed, but Cloverfield demands a completely blank slate if the viewer is to get past the first twenty minutes. The geography of Manhattan, and the time it takes to get anywhere on foot, is ignored. Characters adopt a stoic philosophy towards pain and the death of loved ones, while ignoring the basic rules of bodily safety and successfully quietening the instinctive urge to flee from harm’s way. Everything technological, from video camera battery life to cell phone coverage to the physics of tons of falling steel, is better left unconsidered. The story demands such acquiescence, from its own frantic characters and from the jumping audience. In the race to a conclusion, Reeves and Abrams pile on the implausibilities but with such tremendous style and verve that logic succumbs to nerve endings; Cloverfield is loud and dumb, but it’s exhilarating fun.

The Savage Breast

Tamara Jenkins’ new film offers a coruscating analysis of a failed American family, where a brother and sister are brought together to care for their estranged father once he shows signs of Parkinson’s disease. Jon and Wendy Savage (Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney) have fallen out of touch with one another, even though they both live in New York and are both writers of a kind. He’s a literary professor trying to finish a long-gestating biography of Bertolt Brecht, she’s an unproduced playwright who spends her time between temping jobs applying for, and failing to get, funding from arts institutions. Neither is married, although she is conducting a grimy affair with a married neighbour and he is about to say a muted goodbye to his Polish girlfriend, whose work visa has expired.

Then, late one night, comes the call that their father Lenny (Phillip Bosco) is behaving oddly, news not unconnected to the fact that his elderly girlfriend has passed away and he must move from the house they shared in suburban Arizona. So the siblings, awkwardly reunited, travel to Phoenix to collect their mean-hearted father and return him to a care-home on the East coast, a journey that at first is nothing more than a hassle and at second, a major pain.

I’d watch Linney and Hoffmann do anything, in anything. Both are among the finest American actors working today; brave, brittle, contemporary players with deep reserves of emotion to draw on. They are outstanding here as deeply damaged people, ruined by uncaring parenting, divorce, struggle and self-loathing. As a study of dysfunction and disagreement, The Savages heaps irony on embarrassment to create a vicious miniature portrait of a family that has learned the hard way that love and happiness are concepts from fairytales; that real contentment comes from wherever you can find it, a stolen bottle of painkillers, an imaginary success, a bad affair.

Writer and director Jenkins has a keen eye for faintly surreal detail, but never sentimentalises the material, taking on the deceit and delusion with the same clinical approach she applies to the business of caring for the elderly. In one recurring motif, she has each character stare out the window of a moving car; Wendy in a daze of psychotropic bliss accompanied by birdsong, Jon through a wintry city while listening to a Brechtian torchsong, Lenny blankly regarding bare trees before settling on a cross-strewn graveyard. As the story plays out, interest levels vary in line with the dwindling incident and an overly dyspeptic world view, but that's not to deny the acting talents on display, or their completion of difficult, spiky characters. There are jokes scattered among the miseries but they are the kind of ones that stick in your throat, like chicken bones or heartburn.

Making The Cut

Short, sharp and sour as little apples; arch-goth Tim Burton brings his kohl-eyed and cobwebbed sensibilities to Stephen Sondheim’s dark-hearted musical about the London barber turned serial-killer who wreaks a dreadful revenge on anyone who crosses him.

Burton’s favourite leading man Johnny Depp (Oscar nominated for the role) plays Benjamin Barker, returned from imprisonment overseas with a strange light in his eyes. Years before, the power-mad Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), took a shine to Barker’s wife Lucy, so hatched a plan to ship him off and steal her away. Now the wronged man is back, returned by ship with best mate Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower) to his old, despised streets, seeking out his lost wife and daughter Johanna (Jayne Wisener). Back on Fleet Street, having renamed himself, Sweeney Todd meets the scatterbrained Mrs Lovett (Helena Bonham-Carter), a similarly pale-faced, smudgy-eyed sewer-rat, to discover that Lucy has killed herself and the now-teenaged Johanna has been imprisoned by Turpin and his sidekick Bamford (Timothy Spall) in a mansion house on Hyde Park. An encounter with a former acquaintance Pirelli (Sacha Baron Cohen) brings Sweeney back to his old trade, setting up shop over Mrs Lovett’s pie emporium, with his ‘arm complete’ by his old set of silver straight-edged razors. Then, bloody mayhem.

Burton’s already fantastic world view might have been swallowed up in the artifice of a stage musical, but the director displays a sure touch in an unfamiliar landscape, burnished considerably by superb contributions from production designer Dante Ferretti and costume designer Colleen Atwood. The film looks fantastic but there are long moments of lumpy pacing, in part because everything must stop while the songs are sung. Burton and his cast gamely try to turn these unavoidable longeurs into true show-stoppers by introducing the riper aspects of his story – murder, cannibalism, deceit – in delicately choreographed scenes, some of which work wonderfully and some of which simply don’t. At times the staging feels enclosed, introducing an unnecessary air of stage-bound claustrophobia despite Burton’s compelling staging and coherent vision. He is at his best when he sates his appetite for the macabre, indeed the film is far more vicious and bloody than expected, even if the splashy murders are presented as sickly cartoons and the manufacture of the pies given a cursory, comical treatment.

The perfectly-chosen cast sing the many songs (abridged from the original to fit the time-frame of a screen adaptation) with considerable gusto, even if there are variations in vocal talent. It is odd at first to see Depp open his throat in an unsteady, half-spoken warble, but he soon settles, helped by the ever-present, energetic Bonham-Carter. A scene where she imagines a happy-ever-after for the gruesome couple is a delight, followed immediately by a darkening of theme and tone as Sweeney starts slashing necks. The final section, a confrontation between Rickman’s delightful villain and Depp’s desperate anti-hero, is as bleak and cynical as it is finely-wrought and dramatically satisfying. Blackly funny, beautifully crafted and decidedly weird, Burton’s morbid musical might not hit all the right notes, but there is still a lot to enjoy.