Films Seen - March 2006
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (65) (dir., Ang Lee) Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway, Randy Quaid ["We'll always have Brokeback Mountain," Ennis might tell Jack, CASABLANCA-style - but what do they have, exactly? An illicit interlude (even their legit reason for being there is illegal) that feels less like love blossoming than a gradual wearing-down of defences, giving-in to temptation; the sex is abrupt, indistinct, animalistic, and almost immediately followed by guilt (the sheep that gets killed while the cowboys are neglecting their duties), a taste of things to come. It's a problem, dramatically, because the film hinges on that first encounter resonating through their lives yet there's no real pleasure in this dark amour fou, more a violent compulsion, like an itch that must be scratched - and though (of course) it makes it sadder that even Brokeback Mountain offered no great happiness, it also makes the film something of a blank slate, lending itself to both factions in a polarised America: one can see it as an attack on repression, the blinkered, bigoted society that forces the men's love underground (obv. the filmmakers' preferred interpretation, hence the coded bits like "Nobody's business but ours"), yet it also supports the reading - should one choose to make it - of homosexuality as a curse or disease, blighting the lives of two men who might otherwise be happy; you know what Ennis means when he says they must be careful lest "this thing grabs hold of us again". Not a film for Gay Pride types, or those who like to conflate the two meanings of 'gay' - or those behind movies like GET REAL, or TV shows like "Queer as Folk" - most of whom will tut in annoyance when e.g. the wedding ceremony is prefaced by a snatch of "Forgive us our trespasses", or Jack and his Mexican rent-boy disappear into pitch-black darkness as if in a black hole of shame; better, perhaps, to view it as a film about Time passing and lives being wasted (no surprise that Larry McMurtry had a hand in the script), the queer angle more a handy peg than anything - it could easily have been a doomed straight romance, and the ending is sad in its banality the way e.g. UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG is sad (except this is never as blithe, so it's merely sad instead of deeply romantic). Very subtle in all kinds of ways, from the lightly-sketched bond between Ennis and his similarly reticent daughter, to the sparing use of period props and old-age makeup, to the way it makes it clear the two men share the same passion but have different needs (ironically, the top has the more 'feminine' feelings), to the mutual flashback that unites Ennis and Jack's wife without a word being said - but perhaps most subtle of all about its true intentions: a canny supplicant trying to breach the citadel of mainstream homophobia on all fours, conceding every point about the evils of homosexuality, making no demands except a certain compassion (or pity). No wonder they were steamed at losing the Oscar.]
TONY TAKITANI (67) (dir., Jun Ichikawa) Issey Ogata, Rie Miyazawa ["Tony Takitani's real name was ... Well, it really was Tony Takitani". The fable of a man who lived for things, untroubled by any inner life, his literal-mindedness tinged with a certain beauty. As a boy, asked to paint a flower (the teacher urging his classmates to "use more colour"), he instead devotes himself to an insanely-detailed pencil sketch of a single leaf, taking a fiercely prosaic reality over Art or Imagination; as a man, when he falls in love, it's because of the woman's clothes ("That girl was born to dress up") and later, when he loses her, can only feel the loss by separating the clothes from the woman. Things define their relationship - a cactus plant, a watering-can - and the only suggestion of a happy ending comes when he divests himself of things, and notices emotion (a woman's tears) for the first time; maybe he stands for more than just Tony Takitani (esp. knowing the source-story is by Haruki Murakami, whose cool, deceptively simple prose finds a perfect analogue here) - maybe for a dead-inside, materialistic post-war Japan that's forgotten its aesthetic traditions and taken its cue from the Americans (Tony was named after an American officer; a good idea, thought his father, because "American influence is bound to continue") - but the film's triumph is to take him on his own terms yet aestheticise his story as thoroughly as an origami dragon or cherry-blossom garden. A pristine, ethereal film in beige and white, gentle fades and smooth wipe-like transitions; a shopping spree is implied by shots of feet, a car crash by an offscreen squeal of tires; it's Tony's film, lacking strong colours (as he is), stalked by death and sadness (as he is), yet also a beautiful dream, constantly questioning his narrow commitment to surfaces - and e.g. in the job-interview scene, I swear Ichikawa moves the box of pencils across the frame so it looks on the surface like the camera's panning when it's actually static, adding to the dreamlike dislocation (am I wrong? it's a very strange effect). Lovingly-crafted, though a little stretched-out even at this length. My next mission: Buy the soundtrack!]
GHOSTS (62) (dir., Christian Petzold) Julia Hummer, Sabine Timoteo, Marianne Basler, Aurélien Recoing [As with many acclaimed films, one ends up judging the acclaim rather than the movie. Is this well-structured? Not especially - the cross-cutting between two strands is misleading (since they're not equally important) and even counter-productive: the French couple would be more suggestive - and, well, ghostly - if they had no independent life before meeting our heroine. Is the rhythm seductive? Not really - it's the careful desultory Euro-arthouse rhythm, for the most part. Stylish? In a quiet way - but much of it consists of following people with a Steadicam, and e.g. the long dialogue scene between the couple is fairly standard shot/reverse-shot. Doesn't it exist in a kind of dream reality, made explicit in the heroine's account of her meeting with the other girl, fact and fiction colliding (and co-existing) in her own private world? Isn't it a kind of halfway-house for ghosts from the past, present-tense longings and parallel realities that may or may not someday exist? Sure, but what does that prove? Most films want to be a little mysterious, esp. in this genre - the question is whether they can tempt us to share in the mystery. Doesn't go anywhere very interesting - the girls meet a slick, goateed film director, raising slightly too-obvious themes of voyeurism and fantasy/reality - but it works whenever Julia Hummer is onscreen, a slight waif-like girl with a dreamy expression, the camera catching her shy hopeful glances, wary mien, awkward shuffling in her shapeless clothes, her quiet resentment, moments of longing (though her big scene doesn't play to her strengths, having her shield her eyes), the way she swallows hard when waiting for something to happen. Others may tease out the meanings, if any (Harun Farocki co-wrote, if that helps). For me, Godard's cliché about the history of Cinema being the history of boys photographing girls is enough, in this case.]
JUST FRIENDS (61) (dir., Roger Kumble) Ryan Reynolds, Amy Smart, Anna Faris, Chris Klein, Julie Hagerty [How good does crude, nasty, lowbrow sub-Farrellys comedy get? Approximately this good. The Farrellys wouldn't have included the gay jokes, and may also disapprove of grotesque bits like the catatonic old guy in the hospital, but Kumble manages to wed violent slapstick with relationship comedy (the horror of being in "the Friend Zone"), contrives one of the best split-screen jokes of recent years, and even gets a semi-touching moment when Reynolds revisits his childhood room as an adult - maybe it's the way he stays a beat on the actor's face, maybe the image of a wall still collaged with teenage photos. Went in expecting something like JUST MARRIED, primitive slapstick with zero invention - I only really watched for Anna Faris, predictably great as a Britney-ish (or Lena Lamont-ish) diva whose delusions of grandeur include promoting vegetarianism in the Third World (!) and writing 'serious' ballads called "Forgiveness" - but in fact almost everything works. Sibling rivalry escalates into epic Three Stooges battles. Julie Hagerty, with her permanently startled manner, is surreal as Mom (she likes the colour salmon). The horror cliché where someone opens a mirror-closet, then shuts it again a second later to find the monster reflected in the mirror just behind them, finally gets exposed as a cliché. A bunch of little kids acts as a (misguided) Greek chorus. A bouncer kicks our hero out into the street with a firm "And stay out!" - then, as he trudges back into the bar, may be heard muttering "I allus wanted to say that..."]
DERAILED (45) (dir., Mikael Hafstrom) Clive Owen, Jennifer Aniston, Vincent Cassel, Melissa George, RZA [FATAL ATTRACTION played straying husbands as a fact of life - only a bunny-killing psycho could object - but here infidelity turns into a vortex of guilt and dark complications ('like a prison', I guess is the subtext, hence presumably the weird jailbird finale after the story is effectively over), with a sick little girl at home to emphasise the straying husband's (ir)responsibility. Hafstrom gets some ornate detail in the early family scenes, like a Fassbinder shot of all three family members looking unhappy in discrete foreground/background layers, and in fact the whole thing's pretty ripe - Aniston first glimpsed sticking out a leg on the train, like a femme fatale or Barbara Stanwyck in THE LADY EVE, different film stock (unless it was just my print) for the darker middle section, Cassel emasculating our hero figuratively and almost literally when he grabs him by the nuts in his own home (making him his bitch, in the weird prison subtext). It's clearly Significant, in a foreshadowing-type way, when the daughter writes that book report early on - "The writer intrigues the reader by twisting the narrative so you never know what's coming next" - but in fact you see the twist coming a mile away, esp. since Aniston all but disappears in the second half and no top-tier actress would take a role like that unless ... well, exactly. Every time it's called on to be smart (e.g. working out a clever way for our hero to uncover the truth) it fails the test and runs around in panic; fortunately, being dumb isn't a deal-breaker in this kind of movie.]
ROLLING FAMILY (48) (dir., Pablo Trapero) Federico Esquerro, Liliana Capurro, Carlos Resta [Trapero goes heartwarming (starting with the opening dedication to his own "familia rodante") but the model's much the same as in his previous movies, from the adoption of a striking overall visual scheme - ultra-grainy b&w in CRANE WORLD, very black blacks (was it silver-retention?) in EL BONAERENSE, now the saturated colours in this one - to the pointedly observational style, though this is the first time when you feel he doesn't probe his characters because he has nothing much to say about them. Mostly it's a question of subject-matter - family dynamics (unlike middle-aged crane-operators or Buenos Aires cops) are familiar territory, so it's achingly obvious that e.g. the teens are given no real personality beyond being horny, or the grandma mostly grumbles, or the two sons-in-law are rather simplistically contrasted (the white-trashy one - vest, beer-gut, ass-crack - is also quite a bit more sympathetic than the prim bespectacled one, burnishing Trapero's working-class credentials from CRANE WORLD). Notable mostly for the filmmaking, not so much the snappy rhythm - the jolly music grates, and much of the cross-cutting is pointless - as the images of rich red earth and tropical forest, the night-shot at the wedding party of a woman sitting glumly on a front porch as the well-lit window behind her reveals a happy conga-line threading through the house, and above all the many fluid-camera shots of the large family in their small motor-home, bits of people cramming the frame as they're all packed together in the sweltering heat. The two films may be very different, but someone needs to pair this with LA CIENAGA in an "Argentinean Cinema: People at Close Quarters, Backed by the Buzzing of Cicadas" double-bill.]
DISTRICT B13 (70) (dir., Pierre Morel) Cyril Raffaelli, David Belle, Bibi Naceri [Didn't even know this was Luc Besson; thought it was going to be a gritty LA HAINE-ish disquisition on the state of the banlieues, and in fact I kept on thinking that - despite the uproarious CGI opening credits, exploring a housing-estate by soaring up stairwells, zooming through peepholes and plunging down elevator shafts - approximately till the moment when David Belle, running down a corridor pursued by a gang of thugs, made his escape by jumping on a radiator with his right foot, scaling a front door with his left (lightning-fast, without breaking stride), grabbing a ceiling rail and corkscrewing his body through a tiny skylight above the door, all in a single fluid move. ONG-BAK levels of agility continue in a thrilling chase across rooftops, Belle leaping across chasms and scurrying down buildings - it's called 'parkour', apparently, a kind of athletic martial-arts predicated on constant motion - and the action scenes sing with an awesomely-controlled physicality and former DP Morel's eye for composition; in between is the ludicrous plot, but the film (unlike ONG-BAK) has zero earnestness, going instead for a comic-book cocktail equal-parts-spiked with political comment (the ghettos hidden out of sight behind a high wall, just as - metaphorically - they are in real life) and political incorrectness. It may even be time to stop deriding Besson and start accepting - even acclaiming - him as a modern-day Roger Corman, presiding over a factory that churns out solid genre pictures with quirky touches, meeting and sometimes beating Hollywood at its own game (the TAXI pics are his monster movies, the lucrative bread-and-butter; DANNY THE DOG is like the Poe adaptations, edging towards respectability). Meanwhile: an eeeevil coke-fiend crime lord shoots his henchmen one by one till someone comes up with an idea ("That's not an idea, that's just common sense," he scoffs after one minion's attempt to save his skin), a ghetto-dweller greets a newcomer with "This is Baghdad" and a girl is paraded through a room full of thugs, all of whom wolf-whistle and one of whom slaps her ass as she passes. Later she takes her revenge, by making him eat her panties.]
SERENITY (56) (dir., Joss Whedon) Nathan Fillion, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Gina Torres, Adam Baldwin [Comes on like a STAR WARS populated entirely by Han Solos, snarkily upending clichés at every opportunity (Furious captain, to crew member who's questioning his orders: "Do you want to run this ship?"; Crew member: "Yes!"; Captain: "Well ... You can't"), but the changes turn out to be cosmetic and the film itself is rather tired - too much empty-calorie chop-socky, plus a vaporous message about the importance of Believing in Something (doesn't matter what, just belief as the opposite of apathy - cf. the people on the mystery planet who stopped caring and let themselves waste away). "Nothing here is what it seems", we're told, which is part of the imaginative m.o. - the opening voice-over turns into a teacher talking in class, which turns into a dream (?) in a lab where a secret experiment's in progress, which turns into a video being viewed some time later - but Whedon wants to bring in the genre audience while twitting the genre, and the very florid dialogue (possible weirdest line: "Ain't had nothing twixt my nethers for the past year weren't run on batteries") doesn't get the actors who can speak it; could be just my DVD, but many of the lines were so garbled I had to rewind and watch again with subtitles. "Things are going to get much, much worse," says someone, sounding very much like a cue for the episode credits; you can take the writer out of TV...]
RUMOR HAS IT (46) (dir., Rob Reiner) Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Costner, Shirley MacLaine, Mark Ruffalo, Richard Jenkins [There's a scene at a party halfway through where a group of baby-boomers - about, oh let's say Rob Reiner's age - bemoan the way current movies are all about the special effects, and how you never find stories about "real people" anymore. Hopefully this isn't what they (and Reiner) have in mind, with improbable behaviour galore and Aniston in full sitcom mode, twitchily neurotic and self-conscious (at times she reads the lines as if mentally inserting a laugh-track, e.g. on fear of flying: "I love flying; it's crashing that I hate! ... I hate crashing..."). Seems to me her big-screen days are numbered, to be honest - her pinched, needy presence is sized for the living-room, too pusillanimous to carry a movie (you feel for Mark Ruffalo when she says she's scared and he replies "I'm tired of 'scared'"), unredeemed by either Meg Ryan-esque effervescence or personal glamour. She's obv. not unattractive, but let's put it this way: the plot hinges on whether her real father is owlish, anxious character actor Richard Jenkins or breezy, laid-back movie star Kevin Costner, and Jenkins (though great) seems miscast because they're such a plausible father-and-daughter it makes a nonsense of the whole thing. Elsewhere, the film's GRADUATE gimmick - hanging over the plot, like Bogie's ghost in PLAY IT AGAIN SAM - doesn't really work, possibly because the heroine's way-in doesn't really recall THE GRADUATE so it's hard to connect them (the most famous part, the young man making it with both mother and daughter, is the last piece in the jigsaw; mostly Jen guesses the truth from her Mom having absconded pre-wedding, which has nothing to do with THE GRADUATE), though also because it seems irrelevant - there's one scene that briefly seems to be satirising middle-aged parents in Mike Nichols vein (the "famous saying" about Pasadena standing in for "Plastics"), but mostly it's just a gimmick. At least it's (mildly) different, and the cast are great, and there's a certain introverted diffidence to it - not quite melancholy, but in that direction - as you might expect from a story about "chasing ghosts". Also, remember when Mena Suvari was the epitome of sultry teen sophistication in AMERICAN BEAUTY? She's playing dizzy blondes now.]
EROS (53) (dir., Wong Kar-wai (60), Steven Soderbergh (44), Michelangelo Antonioni (55)) Gong Li, Chang Chen, Robert Downey Jr, Alan Arkin, Regina Nemni, Christopher Buchholz ["I try to stay away from desire," says the woman in Antonioni's segment, but in fact she does all right - though I'm not sure what it says that a 93-year-old man in a wheelchair is the only director willing to engage with Eros head-on, and the only one with faith in the power of love (or lust) to mend a tattered psyche. Soderbergh offers missed connections, Wong offers Love as Dislocation - sounds of pleasure from behind a wall, hero talking not to his beloved but her image in the mirror - and lovemaking as tension, one set of hands embracing, the other pushing away, just as there's a tension between the crudity of the act the dream-woman performs (the segment is called "The Hand") and the feelings of sublime adoration it engenders; as so often in WKW, Woman is remote, a fetishised object of desire, and actual relations between the sexes are warped and impeded by the romantic Ideal. Antonioni also starts with images of constriction, reflecting the couple's relationship - a car in a driveway so narrow it almost scrapes against the edges - often played in terms of juxtaposed inner/outer space (the latter at one point reflected in the former through a glass window), open fields cut off by fences, or a canopy of trees, or a low-slung oppressive poles-and-canvas structure, reflecting inner barriers vs. what they could have if they only remembered how to love. "If you're looking for space, there's plenty around; take it!" says the man - but he's the one who does so, tumbling into Eros with the "girl in the tower", after which naked girls dance on the beach and escaped horses gallop in the background. Obviously pretentious, and the dialogue is hilarious - "I like old things"; "But I am young!" - but it's good to see at least one person read the brief before making the movie.]
CASANOVA (58) (dir., Lasse Hallstrom) Heath Ledger, Sienna Miller, Jeremy Irons, Oliver Platt, Lena Olin, Omid Djalili [Unexpectedly close to the 'bawdy romps' of the 60s (TOM JONES, FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM, etc): I can totally imagine Hugh Griffith as the grumpy Inquisitor who tries unsuccessfully to trap Casanova before being dispatched to Darkest Africa (the actor even looks like Hugh Griffith), and bloodhound-faced Michael Hordern might’ve played the old-fashioned father of our hero's virginal betrothed, who insists on “no intercourse” before the wedding (“I mean, of course, social intercourse,” he adds hastily). Lots of lively scurrying naughtiness, farcical exits and entrances, mistaken identities - Casanova pretends to be four different people, including himself - people following each other through the streets of Venice (which looks luscious, magic-hour light playing on stone, sea and sky) and pratfalls scored to light-classical music, a very 60s touch. That said, the model's almost certainly SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, and like that film it tends to substitute busy-ness for wit, esp. in the dumb action climax - there's too much plot, basically, not enough of the sly, debonair quality one expects to find in a tale of Casanova; a great lover’s secret is always that he doesn’t rush things, but this one seems to be running just to keep up (he should be standing half-outside his story, amused by the frantic goings-on). A pleasant surprise without being especially memorable - except for Oliver Platt as the rightful suitor come to claim his bride, usually the villain of the piece (he's the soldier who "raped Thrace thrice" in FUNNY THING HAPPENED...) but here a pathos-laden fat man both ebullient and insecure; Platt plays the foil superbly, but his wounded whimper when the others don’t recognise his lardy form in a too-flattering portrait brought a lump to my throat (it's his year, what with this and THE ICE HARVEST). Sienna Miller's head-prefect quality isn't quite as prim and severe as Catherine Zeta Jones's, but she still can't banish the suspicion that there weren't many militant feminists in 18th-century Venice.]
XUXA REQUEBRA (13) (dir., Yamasaki Tizuka) Xuxa Meneghel, Daniel, Elke Maravilha [Xuxa (um ícone brazilian da TV) é alto e fino, com cabelo blond realmente curto. Olha como um lifeguard sueco, somente sem os boobies. E seus amigos devem ganhar uma competição da dança para conservar a escola velha de ser feito exame sobre por um negociante de droga gritando da Goth-bruxa. Há uns muitos de cantar. Um vendedor da pipoca canta. Os urchins que lavam o carro de Xuxa cantam enquanto se lavam. Os gracejos são terríveis, Xuxa não é sexy e os olhares inteiros da coisa como a merda. Nonetheless, eu sou feliz viver em um mundo aonde os kidpics brazilian obscuros comecem mostrados (porque???) na TV de Chipre. ]
L'ESQUIVE (68) (dir., Abdellatif Kechiche) Sara Forestier, Osman Elkharraz, Sabrina Ouazani [Sounds, on paper, like wishful thinking - ghetto youths transformed by acting in "Games of Love and Chance" by 17th-century playwright Marivaux - at worst a case of Old France dreaming it can quell the banlieues and car-burnings with a slathering of Culture, at best like your gushy Eng. Lit. teacher insisting on the relevance of "Romeo and Juliet". Fortunately saved in the execution (as you might expect with a Tunisian at the helm), making clear the actors are fighting against the play as much as inspired by it; the teacher wants her charges to break out of themselves (a kind of metaphorical assimilation, engaging with traditional French culture), but the message of the play - and traditional French culture - is that everyone knows their place and like ends up with like, rich with rich and poor with poor. In fact, the youths' complex - and very verbal - negotiations in their daily lives are just as worthy of theatre, a point made when the young lovers end up hashing it out in a parked car with all their friends watching from a distance, exactly as if watching a play, but racist cops break up the moment with brutal disregard for the kids' feelings; Marivaux (and all he stands for) can never transform the ghetto as long as the message being sent - by the cops, by the play - is that you can't transcend your social origins, or the colour of your skin. Also bucks the zeitgeist in two encouraging ways, (a) by rejecting the facile obsession with showbiz (see: reality shows of all descriptions), making clear that some can break out into metaphorical song-and-dance but others are trapped within themselves (the shy inarticulate "Krimo", who may well end up seeking refuge in the violence briefly-glimpsed at the beginning), and (b) by going against the sensationalist emphasis on 'hard' behaviour in underclass movies (LA HAINE, MENACE II SOCIETY and every British movie in the wake of TRAINSPOTTING), creating kids who, for all their foul language and deprived environment, aren't dangerous, amoral or wilfully cruel (indeed, they're quite conservative); the only other example I can think of is RAISING VICTOR VARGAS though of course it's an open question which depiction is more 'honest', and whether it's more reassuring for an audience to show the ghettos as functional communities or evil hellholes - it's clearly less scary when these kids are Just Like Us, but also easier to detach ourselves when we can demonise them. Repetitive - some might say endless - arguing and bickering does get slightly tedious, and the video look is shabby with its chalky skin-tones (though it doubtless gave the young cast more freedom), but this may be the most organic, most engaging ghetto movie of the past few years - and the funniest. Ms. Ouazani has a brilliant way of flaring into anger that never gets old - her eyebrows quiver, her face contracts and she starts to splutter, like a horse about to whinny - while Aurélie Ganito as the dour ex-girlfriend is like the Dardennes' Rosetta plonked down in an Arab bazaar.]
THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS (63) (dir., Asia Argento) Asia Argento, Jimmy Bennett, Cole and Dylan Sprouse, Winona Ryder, John Robinson, Peter Fonda [Alternate title: "My Mother, the Slut". If only this had been made 30 years ago, when Asia could go overboard with the sleaze and nudity (though restraint may have been a conscious decision, given all the exploitation that takes place in the movie); instead she settles for being really funny (in a twisted way), slicing through potentially maudlin material by piling on the agonies with a deadpan glee, with her own performance as Exhibit A - a touch of the Damaged Child (she sucks her thumb when she sleeps) but mostly just exuberant malice as the Mom from Hell, especially in the early scenes. Abuse and neglect are one thing (and obviously not funny, in themselves), but Mom also has the little boy eating out of trash-cans, sleeping in the bathtub while she fucks her latest conquest, popping pills (at her insistence) so he can stay awake during a long car-ride - cut to kid sitting wide-eyed in the passenger seat, looking zonked out of his mind - all while he suffers in silence with a 'Why, cruel world?' expression; horrors piled so implacably topple over into comedy (esp. since they're not real, though I didn't know about the Leroy hoax when I watched the movie), made explicit when the boy's farmed out to fundamentalist relatives and performs a garbled version of "Anarchy in the UK" in their living-room (Argento cuts to a wide-shot of the punk-rocking kid next to his hulking teenage uncle and he looks hilarious, like an angry little rodent rearing up on its hind legs). May sound callous, but actually by not playing the Victim card Argento makes a more affecting point - about the boy's resilience and, more daringly, about the perverse bond between mother and son, most perverse when he dresses in her clothes to 'seduce' her latest fancy-man; there's even something sensual in her sadism, trying to re-create him in her image - "Are you a little boy or a little girl?" - as lovers always do (she sure as hell isn't maternal). You might say she becomes part of his fantasy life, like the red crows and tarantulas and talking lump of coal, making it all the more appropriate that Leroy's book was itself a fantasy. Loses its way near the end, but even JESUS' SON flagged in the final stretch.]
THE DESCENT (52) (dir., Neil Marshall) Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid, Nora-Jane Noone [Why does this film - a thriller set mostly in an underground cave, where six extreme-sport-loving women go exploring - have so little sense of geography? At no point do we get much sense of the layout of the cave, nor, when the team get split up, where everyone is in relation to each other - which is also why the first half is blah, before it transforms from wilderness-survival adventure into ... something else. Kindest explanation: Because it's a big-screen movie, and its spaces get flattened on DVD. Almost equally kind explanation: Because the cave turns out to be uncharted territory, so the disorientation of the audience reflects the disorientation of the characters. More probable explanation: Because there's no grand design, just a succession of shocks with a touch of the DON'T LOOK NOWs (dead child = monster) and each scene contrived to make you jump out of your seat. Shock moments galore, plus not one but two It Was Just a Dream twists - but major respect for the curt, brutal way they resolve the guilty secret we (but not the characters) already know from the opening scene. Girl Power angle is unusual but something of a gimmick, plus the toughest girls end up with the most painful fates making you wonder if Marshall - and his overwhelmingly male target audience - is really as enamoured of tomboy 'tude as he makes out. Mostly effective, though it isn't very good.]