| seen 1st-7th July : Tell No One [5/10], Zepp [7/10*], Hostel 2 [6/10], Die Hard 4 [6/10] |
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| Tuesday, 03 July 2007 | |
 TELL NO ONE : [5/10] : Ne le dis a personne : Fr 06 : Guillaume CANET : 131m (BBFC) seen at The Tyneside Cinema, Gateshead, 1st July : public show : £6.20 It's eight years since Alex Beck (Francois Cluzet) lost his wife Margot (Marie-José Crozée) - officially the final victim of a notorious serial-killer - but he's still grieving the woman who was his childhood sweetheart. One day, he receives an e-mail which seemingly offers proof that Margot is alive and well. A miracle? A hoax? Or something more sinister? Tell No One begins as a slowburningly enigmatic, teasingly Hitchcockian mystery; changes gear for a crackerjack second act of car-chases, car-crashes, fist-fights and gunplay - only to frustratingly fizzle into an overlong denouement where the truth is revealed in a welter of confusing flashbacks and increasingly-implausible exposition. It represents a gallant attempt to condense Harlan Coben's Manhattan-set, best-selling page-turner - complete with sprawling plots and sub-plots, and extensive cast of characters - into a feature-film format. A task which proves beyond the current capabilities of director/co-writer Canet - best known for acting in The Beach. His use of music - a jazzy/moody mix of 'found' tracks (J.Buckley, O.Redding, Groove Armada) and Mathieu Chedid's score is, however, one consistent pleasure. And he's fortunate that his starry cast (K.Scott-Thomas, N.Baye, J.Rochefort) are sufficiently skilled to make the best of their limited screen-time: the script's overcrowded, overloaded nature really allows only Cluzet much room to manoeuvre. As a writer/adaptor, then, Canet clearly still has some way to go. But he shows more than enough action-movie flair in that Bourne-Supremacy-esque mid-section to suggest he's worth risking with future - slightly less over-ambitious - director's-chair assignments. 2.7.07 ZEPP : [7/10*] : Ger 06 : Moritz LAUBE : 45m seen on DVD, Sunderland, 2nd July : with thanks to Moritz Laube Currently best known for editing Wim Wenders' Ode to Cologne (2002) and Land of Plenty (2004), 27-year-old Laube takes an auspicious step towards a feature-film career of his own with this wryly amusing, unexpectedly poignant rural miniature. It's essentially a character-study of the eponymous Zepp (Klaus Manchen), a taciturn, penny-pinching, sixtyish farmer left a widower by his wife's sudden death. Not that our protagonist seems especially grief-stricken - indeed, he's more bothered about the Iceland holiday he booked just before his spouse's badly-timed demise... A video dating-agency subplot strains plausibility, and the musical score is a touch too prominent, but Zepp nevertheless emerges as a low-key, slowburning, well-observed and very nicely-performed charmer - one which mercifully eschews sentimentality and achieves its effects with minimal fuss. 6.7.07 HOSTEL PART II : [6/10] : US 07 : Eli ROTH : 94m seen at Empire, Newcastle, 3rd July : public show : £4.00 Much like Eli Roth's first two efforts - Cabin Fever and Hostel - Hostel Part II is a reasonably proficient, reasonably amusing, reasonably (and enjoyably) unpleasant little horror-comedy; a touch cleverer and more ambitious than it may initially appear (though only a touch), offering tantalising hints that this is a filmmaker capable of much bigger and better things. Right now, however, it's hard to say whether Roth really is the waywardly prodigious Future Of Horror or just a one-trick pony who's skilfully exploited limited talents to reap disproportionate success. The 'decider' will surely be his upcoming Stephen King adaptation Cell - but Hostel Part II suggests that he narrowly deserves the benefit of the doubt. Crucially, the central trio of Lauren German, Bijou Phillips and Heather Matarazzo prove rather better value than the frat-boy leads from the first picture - and (Odin be praised) they aren't saddled with any equivalent of Hostel's insufferable Icelandic buffoon. Though Roth is largely content to retread familiar terrain, his focus is now intriguingly split between the tortured and the torturers - the latter a pair of respectable-seeming Americans. It's a shame, then, that these subversively satirical angles aren't developed particularly well, climaxing with a couple of rather lame/predictable 'twists.' And isn't it a bit rich for Roth to be so savage in his caricaturing of brute capitalism (whether American or European) - when his own picture is essentially a cynical, take-the-money-and-run enterprise, all too blatantly designed to cash-in on its predecessor's unexpectedly moneyspinning notoriety. 6.7.07 DIE HARD 4.0 : [6/10] : aka Live Free or Die Hard : US 07 : Len WISEMAN : 129m seen at AMC, Manchester, 5th July : public show : £4.75 The return of Bruce Willis's smirking action hero John McClane completes an unofficial "twilight of the gods" trilogy for the blokes who - as you may or may not recall - in 1990 so noisily joined forces as "restaurateurs" under the (ill-fated) Planet Hollywood banner. But whereas watching Arnie and Sly rage 'gainst the dying of the light in Terminator 3 and Rocky Balboa proved unexpectedly satisfying, Die Hard 4.0 is no more or less than middling, passable night-out-at-the-multiplex fare. This has always been something of an opportunistic, 'magpie' franchise - parts one and two were loosely based on novels by Roderick Thorp and Walter Wager respectively, part three adapted from a non-McClane script entitled Simon Says. Part four is no exception, its official basis a non-fiction article (John Carlin's "A Farewell to Arms") from Wired magazine, which ominously predicted that the west's all-encompassing reliance on computer-networks would see the rise of "virtual terrorism." An intriguing concept, but here merely a pretext for a very old-school, derivative series of chases, fights, explosions and spectacular set-pieces - which defy the laws of physics and credulity in roughly equal measure. The villains' cyber-geekery does, however, yield the picture's most original and striking sequence, when they edit speeches by US presidents past and future into a sort of menacing, digital 'ransom note.' It's a subversively satirical, hilarious and strangely disturbing variation on the 'found-footage' manipulations practised by avant-garde cine-provocateurs like Craig Baldwin: a welcome, if all-too-brief, excursion to Planet Anti-Hollywood, if you like. 7.7.07  Neil YoungNB 1. all films seen in the UK, and all timings approximate, unless stated otherwise 2. timings taken from the BBFC website are rounded to the nearest minute (i.e. 100min 29sec = 100min, but 100min 30sec = 101min) 3. an asterisk [*] in the rating indicates that film is not a feature (i.e. 0-39m = short; 40m-63m = medium-length; 64m+ = feature) |
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