Films Seen - March 2003

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

MOONLIGHT MILE (31) (dir., Brad Silberling) Jake Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Susan Sarandon, Ellen Pompeo [Reserved, careful tone, and it does look rather nice ('burnished', I guess is the word), but so mannered it's almost unwatchable. Hoffman does his nervous little smile with the rabbit teeth, sparky Sarandon preens, glares, raises eyebrows, signals Independence and Free Spirit with every pore, Gyllenhaal does the dazed big-eyed look, acting - as per usual - like he's recently been hit on the head with a large piece of wood. 'Truth will set you free' is the message - seeing the dead as they really were, with their quirks and hang-ups (not as we tend to idealise them), seeing a situation as it really was, however painful - even if it's just a question of denial giving way to a healing flood of tears ; Silberling tries all kinds of little touches (you can tell it's part-autobiography), from the dead girl's best friend dining out on her grief to the funeral cortège passing groups of curious kids as it heads towards the graveyard, but he's just too much in thrall to convenient phone calls cutting in ju-u-ust as our hero works up the courage to admit his feelings, and Van Morrison wailing on the soundtrack at appropriate moments, and not one but two lengthy 'cathartic' speeches - at the dinner table, then on the witness stand - I freely admit to having fast-forwarded after the first minute or so. Are there no surprises to this glib, trite, well-meaning movie? Well, maybe one : who knew folks were saying "Have a cow" way back in the early 70s (when the film is set), decades before Bart Simpson?] 

WHITE OLEANDER (50) (dir., Peter Kosminsky) Alison Lohman, Michelle Pfeiffer, Renée Zellweger, Robin Wright Penn, Patrick Fugit [Major guilty pleasure, surprisingly enough, with the happy knack of taking off into rip-roaring melodrama every time you start to take it seriously (i.e. every half-hour or so). Pfeiffer the monster-mother is a fascinating character (at least potentially), being the kind of person movies thrive on - strong, charismatic, creative, prone to Life Force actions like getting up on a rooftop to "feel the wind" and Life Force lines like "You can't be an artist if you don't see" - yet also selfish and oppressive ; she's probably too much for the film to handle, Pfeiffer encouraged to banish all traces of warmth from her performance - stretched smile, cold glittering eyes like Bette Davis in THE LITTLE FOXES - yet never quite forsaken, Kosminsky starting the film with sympathetic V.O. and trying unsuccessfully to end it with a mother's sacrifice (you can't have it both ways, as THE LITTLE FOXES knew) ; guess it might still work if one retained some sympathy for the character - or if her self-absorption were played lightly, as in ANYWHERE BUT HERE - but I personally lost all interest when she destroys a lover's work-in-progress book to spite him for cheating on her (any 'artist' who'd disrespect another artist's work like that forfeits all sympathy, I'm sorry). Whole film is a tug-of-war between absent mother's fiery values (she's in prison) and the influence of assorted foster homes and institutions, as experienced by sad-eyed Lohman (alternate title : "I Am Victim"), and it's actually quite potent in its own cartoonish way - except that it spirals into suicides and shootings and murder-by-deadly-nightshade at regular intervals, till you start to wonder just how tough a teenage girl's life has to get before she's allowed to appear on "Oprah" (who apparently recommended the original novel in her Book Club). A ripe hunk of cheese, though Thomas Newman's 'sensitive' score suggests he saw a different movie altogether ; Lohman probably the best of it, in a Kirsten Dunst-ish way, though the character's wounded resilience gets a little tiresome : she survives, like the white oleander...] 

WELCOME TO COLLINWOOD (64) (dir., Anthony & Joe Russo) Sam Rockwell, William H. Macy, Isaiah Washington, Michael Jeter, Luis Guzman, George Clooney [Doesn't really have much reason to exist, seeing as it remakes BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET so faithfully : just about the only change (I think) is upping the slapstick quotient during the robbery itself (I may be wrong, but I don't think I remember pants being lost, or a statue falling on anyone's foot), which actually does more harm than good - the rueful coda feels inadequate after such a monumental succession of pratfalls and disasters. Requisite "shit"s and "fuck"s co-exist harmoniously with not-quite-explicit period setting (implied mostly in the jazzy score and details like the gang using a Super-8 camera for reconnaissance pictures), cosy neighbourhood feel - mugs gossip about other mugs, nuns double as loan-sharks charging interest at the "usual rate" ; "Hey, I know you guys," sez the cop on the beat - and isolated actor-pleasures : Guzman repeatedly yelling "Your mother's a whore!", Jeter's perpetually crushed gnome-face unfolding in a shy half-smile, Clooney as the wheelchair-bound safecracker going on about "the circular saw method" (he also disguises himself as a rabbi at one point) - albeit not in the way of Toto in MADONNA, more the 'exec producer gives himself colourful role' tradition of Michael Douglas in ONE NIGHT AT McCOOL'S. Small-time but canny and light on its feet ; not unlike its heroes, really.] 

DAREDEVIL (51) (dir., Mark Steven Johnson) Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner, Colin Farrell, Michael Clarke Duncan, Jon Favreau [Looks like SPIDER-MAN's going to be the template for all these things, now that Marvel are producing : BATMAN-style levity definitely out, relationships played straight, urban milieu emphasised and sentimentalised (DD on his rooftop, looking out over the city), superhero's moral qualms ("I'm not the bad guy!") raised to the level of real people's feelings, fanboy lore invoked to fill the gaps. Not enough happens yet also too much happens : no real narrative, no grand plan to foil, no quest (hero's hunt for the man who killed his father never really an active issue, even if it's partly why he crime-fights), only one plot twist worth the name - when Elektra mistakenly thinks DD killed her father, and that's only in play for about 5 minutes ; yet the film, despite its slightness, makes demands, trying for morally ambivalent hero, tragic love story, you name it (one might say it's kind of like a superhero itself, a thin little man bulked up in grandiose costumes). Much of this was also true of SPIDER-MAN, with relationships sketched in the first half and action taking over in the second, but perhaps the difference is the difference between Tobey Maguire and Ben Affleck - the former blessed with that touch of magic that'll charm the audience into doing half the work, papering the cracks with goodwill, while the latter is just glib and smirky (his long-chinned face seems perpetually about to break open in a great hee-haw laugh) ; first hour kind of works, and there's cool stuff scattered here and there - Duncan's entrance to "Lapdance", first montage of sounds while terrified young hero flails around on a hospital bed - but no real centre to any of it. Wish I'd Read The Comic-Book, Part 1 : How do the cops know Fisk is Kingpin at the end, with the sirens closing in and everything (DD only knows because Bullseye let it slip, and he hasn't told anybody else)? Wish I'd Read The Comic-Book, Part 2 : How do our hero's heightened senses allow him to leap across rooftops in a single bound, let alone dodge bullets (even if he hears them coming, how can he move fast enough?)? Anyone else giggle at the way Daredevil and Elektra's meetings always seem to cause sudden rainstorms - because only in the rain can he 'see' her - or am I just being unromantic?...] 

AUTO FOCUS (40) (dir., Paul Schrader) Greg Kinnear, Willem Dafoe, Rita Wilson, Kurt Fuller, Ron Leibman [Sex + Pop Culture - CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND-style Style + Schrader's heavy moralism = long haul. "And now a word from our sponsors, Lucky Strike cigarettes," says impossibly square mid-60s incarnation of our hero (I smell 'metaphor for America's loss of innocence'). Church, family, "not in front of the children", usual hypocrisy ("shady magazines" in the garage). Ambitious, career-minded, self-consciously "straight" ; drinks only grapefruit juice, gets Big Break via "Hogan's Heroes". But oh, the price of fame! A nightclub - with strippers! Slinky ladies sidling up, looking for an autograph. Tries to resist, but how? Hatchet-faced Dafoe as creepy emissary of future technology and uncertain moral future. Before long : vodka in the grapefruit juice, orgies up in the Hills, "a day without sex is a day wasted" ; inevitable punishment, degradation, humiliation (Dutch angles, spooky music). Cameo roles for S+M, tits montage and out-of-nowhere dream sequence, strong support from Homosexual Panic, aiming for those brownie-points from right-minded critics ("Perhaps Crane's most fatal lack of self-perspective comes in his assumption that heterosexuality, however rampant, constitutes normality," writes Linda Ruth Williams in "Sight & Sound"), signifying ... what, exactly? That everything would've been OK if this weak-willed, basically decent guy hadn't been so square, and owned up to his quasi-homoerotic relationship with partner-in-depravity Dafoe? (But then why is the latter such a freakish figure, mincing around drink-in-hand like an epicene Salome when all our hero wants is to get his life back? And why show Temptation so starkly and joylessly if not to identify with squareness, prior to self-loathingly mocking it?) Neat real-life coincidence that a TV star also liked to film himself 'performing', but it's not much more than a coincidence if the camera gaze isn't established as a kind of liberation, Dirk Diggler-ing his inner Eddie Adams. "AUTO FOCUS is the antidote to BOOGIE NIGHTS," writes Ms. Williams, as if that were a good thing ; Paul Schrader needs to get laid more in my opinion.]  

ADRENALINE DRIVE (58) (dir., Shinobu Yaguchi) Hikari Ishida, Masanobu Ando, Jovi Jova [Doesn't rock, but at least it rolls : no very compelling reason to watch this one but the rhythms are unforced and surprising, esp. for a comedy with such rib-nudging touches as two cops interrupting an interrogation to have an argument about iced cocoa (they come back later, asking a witness for lunch recommendations). Whole thing's kind of quirky, with pop-singing yakuza and shyly anarchic message about diffident people "taking a chance" in life, but it mostly works as a road movie with no destination (not even nominally, as in most road movies). High-energy slapstick gangsters, coming off like Japanese version of the Dead End Kids, are the best of it (energy's a problem in this kind of film), but there's no real jokes as such : the joke is the absurdity of human connection in such an enormous world, and the way people drift and criss-cross, forming attachments and unlikely alliances, finally getting (more or less) what they deserve. Or something...]

SPY KIDS 2 (54) (dir., Robert Rodriguez) Daryl Sabara, Alexa Vega, Antonio Banderas, Carla Gugino [Cue theme-song - the adventure continues ... I  was actually less enthusiastic for much of it (maybe somewhere in the high 40s), since the novelty's gone and it is just a kids' movie, but you have to give Rodriguez credit in the end, not just for taking on all possible jobs (DP, editor, production designer, even songwriter) but also embodying his ideals in his work, from family values in the plot to thrift and waste-not-want-not in the digital film-making ; he runs a film-shoot like a grocery store, and there's something to be said for that. Downside is a certain over-grounded quality, which is to say its DIY sensibility may be more suited to those TV shows where kids make hand-puppets out of old rags than a full-fledged big-screen kidpic ; looks terrific next to the usual exploitative kiddie crap, though - keeps the bathroom humour down, cuts the in-joke media references altogether (yay!), lets the kids bicker and act goofy and awkward (sweetest bit : Juni's phone call to the President's daughter), even throws in a line like "Do you think God stays in Heaven because He too lives in fear of what He's created?" ; I get a funny feeling kids are going to be discovering these movies (along with the Pixars) long after the slicker Disneys and ICE AGEs have been discarded as yesterday's hits. 'Positive' messages galore, but what's with the celebration of "low-tech" - kids forced to improvise without their precious gadgets - when the whole thing is an unabashed tribute to CGI and the wonders of technology? And why set it up so family loyalty ends up in conflict with what it takes to be a good spy (Gerti must betray her Dad ; the Cortezes shouldn't have trusted "Uncle Felix") when the message in the first film was in fact the opposite? Looks like Rodriguez may be chomping at the bit in his role as Bob and Harvey's in-house kiddie-corn supremo after all...]  

UNDER THE STARS (55) (dir., Christos Georgiou) Akis Sakellariou, Myrto Alikaki [Looks like I have to keep revising my vote for the best Greek film I've ever seen (out of the very few I've seen) - currently this one, which is even more impressive as it's actually Cypriot and I know the director slightly (though it won Best First Film at Montreal, so it's not just me). Story works fine on paper - road movie gets increasingly intense, then takes off into dreamlike fantasy when they actually reach their destination - but doesn't quite carry through in practice, mostly (I suspect) because it peaks too early : middle section has a sensuality I've never seen in a local movie, a real feel for the sea at night (swimming in the moonlight, 'under the stars') and the games people play literally and figuratively, so the climactic reunion feels a little stale in comparison (cf. PLACES IN THE HEART, which has much the same ending but makes it come out of nowhere). Whole thing looks great, capturing both the baking-hot light of Mediterranean summer and velvety feel of humid darkness, even if certain effects tend to get repeated (silhouette shots, jeep-through-landscape vistas, time-lapse night-into-day, incomplete POV through windows or peepholes), but it's really the generous / playful view of people that's a pleasant surprise - all except the dour, Turk-hating hero, whose passionate hatred seems so incongruous Cypriots may well see it as a watershed : the first local film, deliberately or inadvertently, to make righteous nationalism seem outdated and a little ridiculous. For non-Cypriots, presumably just a well-shot, wistful drama with some rough edges (first thing we see is a rather clumsy focus-pull) and a miscast lead actor ; still worth watching.]

FAST FOOD, FAST WOMEN (48) (dir., Amos Kollek) Anna Thomson, Jamie Harris, Robert Modica, Louise Lasser [Can we say 'quirky' (or do we prefer 'magical realist')? Somewhere in the city, a woman lies down in the middle of the street, trying (she explains) to "put some excitement in my Sunday morning". Another, met in a drugstore, introduces herself as a "fantasy-fulfiller slash social worker". A man wants to open a restaurant called 'Fast Food, Fast Women'. A Broadway producer plans a new version of Godzilla, "in a leotard, singing Hasidic songs". A streetwalker with a terrible stammer tries (in vain) to proposition a passer-by. Our heroine climbs out on her balcony clad only in a towel, then takes it off and throws it to the skies - where it floats down into the arms of a homeless man camped on the street below. She's a waitress who used to be a stock analyst on Wall Street, but left because "it didn't seem real" - which should be Kollek's wryly self-deprecating comment on the cutesy world he's created, but isn't. Mines the same 'various people looking for love in the city' seam as any number of recent indies - most memorably MAGNOLIA, though the funky-gritty feel for NYC as a place of everyday magic reminded me most of SMOKE - and the casual approach to contrivance and coincidence means you can never take it very seriously, but it does have Anna Thomson, with her lush bee-stung lips and interestingly weird face (all her features seem too big for the face, as if they were added on later), and a certain tension between earthy and lyrical, and fondness for those lives that are "not depressed but very low-key", and a certain neighbourhood intimacy - or maybe I'm just casting around trying to justify a film I didn't so much enjoy as seldom not enjoy. Typical scene : person grumbles to his/her friend(s) about a relationship. Most annoying character : the little girl. "I'm a child..."]

DARK WATER (53) (dir., Hideo Nakata) Hitomi Kuroki, Rio Kanno, Shigemitsu Ogi [Grows in the memory, mostly because it's so well-proportioned - making much out of little, working through a spooky little plot with a poignant epilogue as the icing on the cake - and suggests rather than shows, which is why it still gnaws at the mind hours or days later. Not especially rewarding to watch, though, too familiar to really grip (even if familiarity is part of the point) : same child-from-beyond-the-grave shtick as in RING (from the same director), padded out with SHINING-style deserted corridors, creepy-depressing atmosphere and a penchant for ethereal touches - a face reflected in water, a wraith-like little girl half-glimpsed in a corner. Nakata means to craft tension through the most mundane objects - the idea is to have you screaming at a shot of a little red satchel - which of course is admirable, and what he does is sometimes ingenious (e.g. leaving out room-tone when the girl returns as a teenager, so the silence presses down unnaturally), but the free-floating stylised unease keeps bumping up against the prosaic woman-in-peril plot, and it never really takes off psychologically - these things seldom work unless the hero(ine) is in some way unlikeable, suggesting darkness or insanity (see e.g. Jack Torrance in THE SHINING, the panther-woman in CAT PEOPLE, the stern mother in THE OTHERS, even freaky-looking Mia in ROSEMARY'S BABY), whereas this is really just a ghost story with a rather pious parental-responsibility message. Still pretty scary if you let it get to you - but you feel like a sucker for doing so, and it's not supposed to work like that.]

Dear Mr. Higgenbotham,

I regretfully inform you that I have decided to resign from my position as film reviewer on the 'Daily Gazette', and ask you to consider this my TWO WEEKS NOTICE (26) (dir., Marc Lawrence) Sandra Bullock, Hugh Grant, Alicia Witt, as per contract.

I believe I have been patient during my time at the paper, showing forbearance even when asked to review obviously dire and unworthy material. I did not complain when forced to subject myself to THE TUXEDO, nor did I report the extraordinary behaviour of Mr. Gorschak in Personnel when he threatened to fire me on the spot if I didn't quit whining and go watch SCOOBY-DOO. However, this latest romantic comedy (I use the term loosely) was more than I could bear.

This motion picture stars Mr. Hugh Grant, whose well-spokenness can not disguise the wafer-thin dialogue he has to spout, and Ms Sandra Bullock, whose 'girl next door' persona - now increasingly shopworn - can not begin to make sense of her bizarre character. I note Ms Bullock also produced the film, so perhaps the catalogue of humiliations to which her character is subjected - from spilling coffee and snoring unpleasantly to being booed by an entire baseball stadium - is a kind of masochistic penance she has imposed on herself for being a major star, or perhaps a female equivalent to the battered machismo favoured by Mr. Mel Gibson in BRAVEHEART. To be blunt, I neither know nor care.

In short, dear Mr. Higgenbotham, I found this film a trial. Indeed, so annoyed was I at the threadbare plotting and foolish jokes that I became quite vocal in my displeasure. When Mr. Grant was told, "You need someone who can write a brief instead of removing yours", I harrumphed audibly. When Ms. Bullock rushed away from a wedding (where she was maid of honour) to meet Mr. Grant after receiving a text message - only to find he merely wanted her to help him pick out a shirt - I cried 'Oh for goodness sake!', and attracted the unwelcome attention of a couple sitting directly in front of me. When Ms. Bullock made a fool of herself by dropping money in a man's coffee cup (thinking he was homeless and the cup was empty) I lashed out in frustration, inadvertently stabbing myself in the thigh with my pen, and was in pain for some time thereafter.

In sum, sir, I have now realised that film reviewing is not a job for grown-ups. At one point in the film - I believe it was after an interlude involving Ms Bullock's upset stomach, and her need to find a toilet after consuming several 'chilli dogs' - I even had a sudden sense-memory of my old mother embracing me on my first day of school, crying 'Make us proud, baby!'. (This was disconcerting, as my poor mother has been dead these many years.) I freely admit the climactic idiocy of Ms. Bullock rushing into Mr. Grant's - unaccountably unlocked - hotel room to find him in bed with her replacement had me kicking the back of the chair in front of me. Unfortunately this again drew the attention of the aforementioned couple, and the gentleman, believing himself insulted, engaged me in a physical discussion I will not describe here. Suffice it to say my medical expenses have been duly forwarded, with all relevant paperwork, to Mr. Lund in Personnel and Miss Wazowski in Accounting.

I trust the above will indicate why I have taken the decision to resign. Please allow me to make clear, however, that the film is not merely - to my mind - a silly comedy, but something rather more sinister. It may be a consequence of having watched PEOPLE I KNOW a few weeks ago (which also made 60s radicalism seem tragic and irrelevant), or perhaps a function of the current political climate in the US, but I couldn't help noticing how consistently the film mocked Ms Bullock for her social conscience - the incident with the 'homeless' man being but one example - and how indulgently it coddled the wealthy Mr. Grant. Though never on the barricades myself, I well recall listening to shouts of 'No Nukes!' and 'Here come the pigs!' as I sat in the college library, and take no pleasure in seeing such sentiments held up to ridicule, especially by a film so insignificant.

In conclusion, Mr. Higgenbotham, allow me to thank you for the opportunity of trying my hand at film reviewing, if only in helping me discover how poor a film can be and still make over $80 million in the US. As for the future, I confess to having recently developed most tender feelings for the wispy Miss Bartholomew in Marketing, and we shortly intend to start 'living together' as well as joining forces in a business venture. We hope to open 'Frank and Amy's Fried Chicken', to which of course you are all cordially invited in memory of the dear old days here at the Gazette.

Yours sincerely,

Franklin G. Pooter

L'ENNUI (67) (dir., Cédric Kahn) Charles Berling, Sophie Guillemin, Arielle Dombasle, Robert Kramer [One of those films you watch and wonder why only the French seem to get it, human being-wise (though it's based on a novel by Moravia). Ballsy title for an intellectual talk-piece, but in fact the (delicious) joke is that our hero's intellectual ennui - "I need sublimation," he insists in an early scene - is nothing beside the single-minded physicality of his young temptress, a big-breasted Rubens beauty with the sex-drive of an animal and the spiritual life of a piece of furniture : he asks her endless questions, she answers noncommittally ; he asks about thoughts and feelings, she replies she doesn't know ; he takes out his frustration through fierce, angry sex, she says "That was so great" ; he gives her money to show her what a whore she is, she takes it and puts it in her purse ; "If only you were cruel or perverse - but you're just insensitive!" he cries - and of course wants her all the time, becoming increasingly obsessed and deranged. Conceptually hilarious, a brilliant satire of thinking-man's self-consciousness vs. easy, uninhibited sexuality (the twist being the latter ends up looking more unnatural than the former) - but just as you're shaking your head with delight and preparing to place it high on your Top 10, it unaccountably goes on (and on) for nearly two hours, stretching a lovely anecdote to breaking point. Still pretty good, and no other film has used Berling's thin-lipped, querulous persona so effectively ; how a man so off-putting can be a star is another question entirely.]

CATCH ME IF YOU CAN (55) (dir., Steven Spielberg) Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken, Nathalie Baye [Isn't it odd (and telling) that America's premier film-maker has still never made a successful comedy - and probably never will, if this bloated (if finally affecting) slab of something-or-other is any indication. Always unfair to judge a film on what it might (or should) have been, but this plot, with its emphasis on audacious scams and fact-stranger-than-fiction narrative, does seem to be crying out for the OCEAN'S ELEVEN approach - a zippy, jazzy caper where everything is light and forever on the move (as per the title and just like our hero, who's forever running - even when the cause is hopeless, trying to run his way out of prison), and impossible things happen with audacious ease. The point with such an approach is you can still bring out neediness and connection, and it works even better because of the preceding comic energy - the reason why the fountain / "Clair De Lune" scene in OCEAN'S ELEVEN hits so hard is because it crystallises something that's been simmering unseen throughout the movie. Spielberg instead plays for tragedy, with a stately, portentous look - halos round the characters ; a Rotary Club meeting lit with dozens of little table-lamps, looking like candles at a religious ceremony ; hazy white light streaming through the window as Baye potters about in the kitchen - and pace to match : threat of exposure always hangs in the air, scenes of Frank nearly caught out and/or giving himself away far outnumber those where it all goes effortlessly right, only the stewardess scam tries (much too hard) for exuberance ; even when he falls in love it's with a sad, pathetic girl. There's a good thematic reason why the film should prefer thoughtful 'substance' over glitter - like our hero says, dazzling surfaces (like the Yankees' pinstripes) are precisely the tools of the con-man - but the problem is perhaps that Spielberg's trying to grow up while still attached to the old childish emotions : the key scene has to be the one where Frank finds out his Mom's been cheating on his Dad, but it's key because he realises deception is the way of the world, not because it's Mom and Dad. The film becomes a tale of a boy trying to bring his parents back together and it sucks all the joy out of Frank's deceptions, not to mention being a little silly : here's a 16-year-old kid getting fast cars, sexy women and truckloads of money, yet the film seems fixated on the thought that 'it all means nothing if he doesn't have his family'. Spielberg's great (obviously), but this arrested pre-adolescence is becoming a problem ; even MINORITY REPORT ended up being a film about a bad father...]

28 DAYS LATER (63) (dir., Danny Boyle) Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Megan Burns, Christopher Eccleston, Brendan Gleeson [For about an hour, the first true shot-on-video horror film of the new millennium, using the drab, grungy look - as if set in a low-budget world where everything glamorous or beautiful has been wiped out - in exactly the same, grimly detached way as 70s 'nightmare movies' like DAWN OF THE DEAD (which gets at least one explicit reference when our heroes evade the zombies long enough to go on a shopping spree in a deserted supermarket) ; it then - when they run into the soldiers - turns into something more or something less, according to taste. On the one hand, the plot peters out, the zombies (or "infected") almost disappearing as the danger they pose pales beside that posed by the soldiers (DAWN worked similarly but that was by changing our outlook on the zombies, not marginalising them completely) ; on the other, the film builds towards a statement on Britain Today - making sense of the many references to Britishness, from black cabs to "put the kettle on" - pitting New Labour against Old Tory in the guise of a horror movie. Our heroes include a kid, a "New Age sergeant" and a black female chemist, as in the 'Chemical Generation' (she even mixes up a drugs cocktail at one point) ; the soldiers are sexist, fascist and - it turns out - Euro-sceptics, refusing to accept the possibility of life beyond this "diseased little island" ; the film's recurring line, paying off at the very end, has people crying out "Hello? Hello?" - reaching out to others (other people, other cultures), like the essence of Europeanism and multi-culturalism, and the very opposite of a Little Englander. In itself, intense and harrowing, with some vivid images - the "infected" swarming in a deserted tunnel ; dead parents lying on a bed (that grey chilly texture is pure video) ; London at daybreak, completely deserted - but about half an hour too long. Could've worked as well - maybe better - without the grand statements, but I guess you have to expect that when a novelist decides to turn original scriptwriter.]

BLUE CRUSH (41) (dir., John Stockwell) Kate Bosworth, Matthew Davis, Michelle Rodriguez [Why was I convinced this was going to be special (as opposed to just another teen movie)? Stockwell certainly takes his work seriously - as in CRAZY / BEAUTIFUL the romance is mapped out more carefully than you might expect (Davis looking through the peephole is a nice touch), and the surfing scenes are obviously intended to be the definitive surfing scenes ; but there's only so many times you can watch a pipe wave, or whatever they're called, curl around a fleeing surfer, and that's only when the sport isn't being defanged and Disneyfied - served up as a fun time for all, kids and dogs and fat guys in a mad surfing montage with party music on the soundtrack (Hawaii hasn't looked this plastic since BLUE HAWAII) ; even when our heroines work as maids to pay the rent it's kind of gross but also kind of fun, with another mad montage where they try on people's dresses and spray each other with those crazy nozzle-sprayers. Mythical, surf-as-existential-test angle, BIG WEDNESDAY-style, is here as well, and seems to add an interesting undertow for a while : heroine is torn between her femininity - a woman in love - and a male, macho, ultra-competitive world (Personal motto : "I'm gonna be the best surfer in the world". Worst thing you can say to a girl : "You're such a Barbie") ; gender lines are drawn, climactic confict seems inevitable - till the film happily cops out of any unpleasantness, turning things around so a chief competitor mutates (but why?) into a friend and mentor for the big climax. Seems you can have it all if you're a bright breezy summer movie with hot chicks and a good heart ; did we mention "Cruel Summer" with a thumpy backbeat?...]

WENDIGO (67) (dir., Larry Fessenden) Patricia Clarkson, Jake Weber, Erik Per Sullivan [Enjoyed this so thoroughly it's a bit disconcerting to find that it doesn't bear much thinking about : why invoke the revenge of the land on those who exploit it - e.g. by telling of the town that was flooded so as to provide NYC with drinking water - if the ancient spirits turn out to be an ally rather than a menace? why provide the whole deer-hunting quarrel for Otis if it turns out he's got it in for whoever stays at the house anyway? I guess the answer is simply to add surprise, throw in some red herrings, etc., but it screws things up - not least because this rural-horror genre depends on culture-clash and one side inadvertently offending the other (see esp. SOUTHERN COMFORT) so it's significant if you flood their towns or accidentally run over 'their' deer ; nothing really beats the superb opening sequence, in any case - disjunctive editing calling up terrific spirits-of-the-forest spookiness - but Fessenden keeps things moving with a striking visual style (favourite device being the 'zoom done with freeze-frames'), images like the mountain rapids shot in fast-motion (losing definition till the white water looks gaseous, like rippling clouds) and a vivid family relationship at the heart of it all, selfish-macho Dad and neurotically 'sensitive' mother, freaking out with the hunters but later reassuring Junior that "it's okay to hunt if you're getting in tune with Nature" (wouldn't want the boy to be intolerant). Stuff keeps building - an axe, a child's nightmare, a mysterious "incident" mentioned but unspecified - flowing in and out of the family tensions, held in place by the stillness of snowy landscapes. Stylish, tall-taleish and a lot of fun - but why, for instance, does it push the theme of modern dysfunctional family caught in a world of older values (vintage toys at the general store) out to punish them for their free-and-easy behaviour (cuts to the kid certainly seem to imply disapproval when the parents curse in front of him, or talk about who's shagging who) if nothing of the sort actually happens? Forget it, Jake, it's Wendigo...]

SECRET BALLOT (35) (dir., Babak Payami) Nassim Abdi, Cyrus Abidi [Might be a landscape thing : I'm happier with the bustle of Tehran or the hilly country of Kiarostami's Koker than the desert island of Kish (also the locale for DAY I BECAME A WOMAN, another Iranian film I didn't care for), which seems to deaden people into abstract figures-in-a-landscape - at least in a film like this one, which favours long-shots and generally cares more for Issues (women in Iran, democracy as a path to empowerment) than characters anyway. Interviews with the director (notably the one in 'Sight & Sound') suggest a more nuanced film in his mind - more ambivalent about the virtues of 'modernisation', some of which survives in the desultory feel of the various encounters ("What do you know of our problems?") - but subtleties are overwhelmed by the stark, didactic concept, and the hand of non-Iranian co-producers (with an eye to the Western audience) seems clear when our heroine winces unhappily at the information that a girl might get married at 12 in the Iranian hinterland (cue thoughtful music) : surely even a Tehran sophisticate would take that in her stride, in the way a New Yorker in hillbilly country might be more amused than shocked at talk of bizarre local customs (only we in the West wince unhappily, seeing Iran's Third World vestiges as the marks of Oppressive Theocracy). Dullish concept without visual compensation - ignoring Payami's sub-absurdist flourishes (traffic lights in the middle of the desert), as indeed we should - makes for a long haul ; mileage may vary, esp. if you like people-pawns and handsome rock-and-sea compositions. Is there hidden meaning - or just unfortunate sound recording - to the fisherman who flatly refuses to vote getting drowned out by the roar of a passing speedboat?]