| OUT LIKE A LION : March roundup ('The Last Mimzy' / 'The Good German' / 'King of the Ants') |
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| Tuesday, 27 March 2007 | |
 THE LAST MIMZY : [7/10] USA/Canada 2007 : Bob Shaye : 96m : seen 27th March at Empire cinema, Newcastle (UK) - press show Don't let that terrible title put you off. A rare directorial turn from New Line studio boss Bob Shaye, The Last Mimzy is one of the most enjoyable children's films of the year - ideal for the upcoming holiday season. The picture's old-fashioned charms and measured pace (it's roughly 90% gentle buildup and 10% rousing, touching, FX-heavy payoff) may well mean, however, that it delights "accompanying" adults more than its theoretical target-audience. The script (credited to four writers) is based on a reportedly much-beloved short story from 1943 entitled Mimsy Were the Borogoves - a line from the first stanza of Lewis Carroll's nonsense-verse classic Jabberwocky which roughly translates as "miserable/flimsy were the extinct parrot-like creatures." In the science-fictional tale by Lewis Padgett, a young brother and sister stumble across toys which have magical properties, and which turn out to have been dispatched from an imperilled, distant-future Earth. This adaptation - updated to modern-day Seattle and its picturesque environs (though mostly shot in Vancouver) - adheres pretty closely to the original story, though the ending is notably different in one rather crucial detail, and our sibling protagonists Noah (Chris O'Neil) and Emma (Rhiannon Leigh Wryn) don't have to decipher the poem in order to work out the toys' derivation and purpose. Perhaps it was felt that a movie stressing the wonders of science was educational enough without adding the joys of literature into the mix. Indeed, the plot isn't exactly a model of clarity as it is, and there are numerous details which one could charitably describe as having been left to the viewer's imagination. At other junctures, exposition is ladled out in rather over-generous proportions, much of it technobabble about the development of children's brains, the remainder so spacily new-agey (there's much discussion of Nepalese mandalas and nefarious 'cultural pollutants') you wonder if the film-makers aren't aiming for a kiddy-friendly variation on M Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water - especially when it's revealed Emma might be the kind of supernatural prodigy known by Tibetans as a "tulku." This hippy-dippy angle is presumably why Roger Waters was called upon to perform the gloopily prog-rockish ballad that incongruously accompanies the end credit-roll, and may delight parents (or perhaps even grand-parents) brought up in the sixties/seventies on a diet of Tolkien and patchouli-oil. It is, however, engagingly personified by Rainn Wilson and Kathryn Hahn as the children's schlubby science-teacher and his ditzy fiancee - a pair given sufficient screen-time and characterisation to comfortably eclipse the notionally top-billed Joely Richardson and Timothy Hutton as the tots' initially-skeptical parents. Michael Clarke Duncan, meanwhile, is somewhat wasted in a 'government heavy' role roughly equivalent to E.T.'s Peter Coyote (one of several 'borrowings' from Spielberg's picture.) Stars of the show, however, are newcomer O'Neil and the younger but slightly more-experienced Wryn (she played an infant version of Jennifer Connolly in Ang Lee's Hulk) - both of them winningly endearing and mercifully unprecocious. The eponymous Mimzy, meanwhile - a cute, inanimate bunny-rabbit doll (the picture unfolds during Easter holidays) who 'speaks' in a kind of quiet electronic gurgle - is arguably the scene-stealingest plaything since A.I.'s ambulant, robotic Teddy. Even so, they really could and should have called the picture something else: in 2007, did the studio really think that any young boy would dare ask to see a film entitled The Last Mimzy? THE GOOD GERMAN : [5/10] USA 2006 : Steven Soderbergh : 108m : seen 26th March at Empire cinema, Newcastle (UK) - press show Since picking up his Best Director Oscar for Traffic in 2001, Steven Soderbergh has settled into an even rhythm: a megabucks, all-star Ocean's picture every three years to pay the bills, with a couple of lower-budget 'experiments' squeezed into the gaps. Thus Ocean's 11 (2001) was followed by Full Frontal and Solaris (both 2002); Ocean's 12 (2004) by Bubble (2005) and now The Good German - with Ocean's 13 duly completed and scheduled for a June opening. An impressive workrate by any standards, and hats off to Soderbergh for pulling off the notoriously tricky Hollywood-movie/personal-project juggling act. Unfortunately The Good German suggests that he needs to take a little time-out. This is by no means a terrible picture, but given the personnel involved on both sides of the camera, the fascinating subject-matter and the fact that it's based on a very well-regarded and best-selling novel (by Joseph Kanon, published in 2001) it must count as a major disappointment. The casting is also a problem: of the three central roles, only Cate Blanchett emerges with much credit. Just as the film overtly and repeatedly references both Casablanca and The Third Man (among others), she channels Ingrid Bergman and Alida Valli to suitably fatalistic effect as Lena, a prostitute in 1945 Berlin whose shady past is filled with dark secrets. George Clooney and Tobey Maguire seem much more ill-at-ease as the two Americans (the former an idealistic war correspondent, the latter an craven, brutishly immoral serviceman) with whom Lena becomes romantically entangled, despite her marriage to former SS officer Emil (Christian Oliver.) Emil, eventually revealed to be the 'good German' of the title, is the point around which the entire plot cumbersomely pivots: he's wanted by both the Russians and the Americans because of his role as secretary and right-hand man to a key weapons designer (a character at least partially based on Werner Von Braun.) The 1945/6 shenanigans between the victorious Allied Powers - the very public carve-up of Europe at the Potsdam conference, and the concurrent, very private scramble to secure the services of the top Nazi atomic-scientists - is dynamite material, and it's no surprise that several film-makers (including, at one point, Paul Verhoeven) have been interested in bringing it to the screen. Unfortunately, scriptwriter Paul Attanasio can't quite come up with sufficiently a solid fictional framework with which to explore these potent themes. The plot plods and lumbers along before snarling up in a confusing series of noirish twists, double-crosses and nebulous intrigues - the fact that Clooney's character is named 'Jake' providing several unflattering echoes of Polanski's Chinatown. The screenplay's deficiencies might not have been such a problem if Soderbergh had chosen a more straightforward filming method. He opts, however, for the kind of anachronistic retro-stylisation adopted by Fassbinder on Veronika Voss: despite very contemporary 'bad language' throughout and a decidedly 21st-century attitude to on-screen sex, the monochrome picture has the sound (Thomas Newman's suitably-incessant score was Oscar-nominated) and look of a middle-budget late-forties production. This enables Soderbergh to seamlessly incorporate (in a manner similar to Clooney's Good Night and Good Luck) plenty of archive footage, but it's never clear to what extent his approach is droll parody, larkish pastiche or respectful tribute - an ambiguity which sits uncomfortably with some of the harrowingly painful subject-matter. In the end, The Good German feels like an arch, stilted exercise for an over-ambitious director whose successes mean that his carte is a perhaps touch too blanche. Or, in this instance, too noir et blanc : given the elaborate lighting effects and visuals, it's just as much a self-indulgent workout for the cinematographer. Actually, Soderbergh both directed and shot the film, performing the latter duties under the nom de camera Peter Andrews - he also edited it under the alias Mary Ann Bernard. So much subterfuge, so much palaver - it's almost enough to make you long for the banal simplicities promised by Danny Ocean and company... KING OF THE ANTS : [5/10] USA 2003 : Stuart Gordon : 98m : seen 20th March on DVD in Arthingworth, Northamptonshire (UK) It may seem like an improbable comparison, but there are grounds for describing Charlie Higson as the British version of Madonna: both were born in the summer of 1958, and are multi-talented, enormously successful individuals who, for whatever reason, haven't been able to transfer their considerable gifts to the medium of cinema. To be fair to Higson, he's only actually tried it twice: 1994's ill-received Suite 16 and, nearly a decade later, King of the Ants - an adaptation of his own novel, written in the late eighties and published in 1992. This audaciously violent and blackly comic thriller helped establish Higson as a writer, his having previously been best known as lead singer of proto-indie band The Higsons (their single Conspiracy reaching #47 in John Peel's 1982 Festive Fifty, no less). It was his TV work on The Fast Show, however, which really propelled him to star status in the mid-nineties - though more recently he's returned to books as the author behind the 'young James Bond' series. And there's just a smidgin of 007 in King of the Ants: its hero is tasked with bumping off a troublesome individual, succeeds, is then harrowingly tortured by his villainous 'employers,' and escapes their clutches to embark on an ill-advised romance with the dead man's widow (shades of Michael Tolkin's 1988 novel The Player there?) It could almost be the general outline of a Fleming novel - except that the picture's protagonist is a slightly scruffy Los Angeles odd-job man rather than a suave representative of Her Majesty's Secret Service. He's Sean Crawley (Chris L McKenna looks like a younger, leaner Danny Huston), a genial sort who, we rapidly deduce, is drifting through his twenties without much sense of direction. A chance meeting with ebullient electrician 'Duke' Wayne (George Wendt, whose enthusiasm for the novel got the project off the ground) brings Sean into contact with the latter's business-associate Ray (Daniel Baldwin on top form), a sleazy building-contractor. Ray and Duke are looking for someone to put the "frighteners" on City Hall pen-pusher Eric (coyly-uncredited Ron Livingston), who's threatening to expose their nefarious practices. They hire Sean to bump Eric off, secretly reckoning that the young chap's inexperience will lead him to bungle the job and thus send only a 'message' to their nosey foe. Sean, however, proves to have rather more of a flair for homicide than they expect - with grisly consequences for all concerned. Adapting his own novel, Higson manages to transfer events from late-eighties London to early-zeroes Los Angeles without too much problem - but what works on the page doesn't always come off too well on the screen. In addition, he isn't especially well-served by a director (emerging from a career lull in the wake of 2001's lumpen Lovecraft adaptation Dagon) whose instincts tend to veer towards the phantasmagoric: one senses Gordon is happiest during a couple of elaborate hallucinations endured by Sean after he's been repeatedly battered around the head by Matthews and his grinning goons. These nightmare sequences don't propel the plot forward one iota - indeed, their somewhat ropey special-effects betray the project's budgetary restrictions. There are some very strong moments along the way: Eric's murder strikes just the right balance between graphic violence and semi-jokey absurdity, while Matthews' (objectively rather implausible) ploy of inflicting brain-damage on Sean with a golf club is presented in truly disturbing and hard-to-watch fashion. Elsewhere the picture lurches uncertainly between tones, before a messy climax in which it settles on an offputtingly flip brand of apocalyptic nihilism (people are, you know, just like, ants, so, you know, who cares what happens to them?) as Sean emerges from his various travails and traumas as a swaggering, unsympathetic killing-machine. And while the location and set-up seems to promise a Tarantino-flavoured update of The American Friend, what we get is more like a straight-to-video B-picture with ideas above its station - and whose aspirations towards cult-movie status are as obvious as they are optimistic. Neil Young 27th March, 2007 all timings are from BBFC |
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