| seen 23-29 Sep : The Kingdom [7/10]; 3:10 To Yuma [7/10]; "Realm and Conquest" [7/10], etc |
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| Wednesday, 26 September 2007 | |
 reviewed below : Cinema Aspirins and Vultures; The Kingdom; 3:10 to Yuma; El Cobrador - In God We Trust; Feast of Love; Halloween; Realm and Conquest (actual title Michael Clayton) CINEMA, ASPIRINS AND VULTURES : [6/10] : Cinema, aspirinas e urubus : Brz (Brz/Neth) 05 : Marcelo GOMES : 99 mins (approx) seen at National Media Museum, Bradford : 25th Sep : public show (£5.00) - Bite The Mango Film Festival Genial 1942-set road-movie, unfolding in various dustily-remote Brazilian backwaters - their torpid calm sitting in stark contrast to the traumatically epochal events transpiring elsewhere on the globe. Focus is on a twentysomething German salesman (Peter Ketnath) travelling around the country in his van, advertising the remarkable properties of new 'wonder-drug' aspirin by means of ad-hoc cinema projections. The laidback, blond-maned, bearded young German - essentially a backpacker/hippy type, born three decades early - strikes up a cross-cultural friendship with a acerbically-cynical hitchhiker (Joćo Miguel). That's about the extent of the plot, but the picture is a treat to look at - courtesy of Mauro Pinheiro Jr's cinematography - and the central duo make for engaging enough company. Pleasantly painless, then, without ever exactly taking off. 29.9.07 THE KINGDOM : [7/10] : US (US/Ger) 07 : Peter BERG : 110 mins (BBFC) seen at Vue, The Light, Leeds : 26th Sep : press show The Kingdom boasts the most striking opening-titles since 2004's Dawn of the Dead: a potted history of Saudi Arabia, providing factual background for the fictional drama (an FBI team investigates a terrorist atrocity in Riyadh) that follows. But whereas Dawn went downhill as soon as the film proper began, actor/director Berg here handles proceedings with engrossingly smooth professionalism. And despite an ad-campaign which threatens a slam-bang flag-waver a la Stealth, The Kingdom is closer to, say, A Mighty Heart: documentary-style, serious-minded, scrupulously-impartial in its handling of hot-potato political issues. The last half-hour does deliver on the explosive-action front - but, despite the occasional Team America moment, this is the kind of sombre affair where the survivors end up exchanging haunted looks rather than high-fives. 29.9.07 3:10 TO YUMA : [7/10] : US 07 : James MANGOLD : 122 mins (BBFC) seen at CineWorld, Bradford : 26th Sep : public (£5.40) After the dopey Identity and the interminable Walk the Line, Mangold finally gets his act together with this no-nonsense Western remake - one whose "frank" language and moral shades-of-grey indicate the welcome influence of gritty small-screen 'oater' Deadwood. Even at 122 minutes - a full half-hour longer than Delmer Daves' semi-forgotten, critically-lauded 1957 original - the pace very seldom flags. Stepping into Van Heflin and Glenn Ford's battered Olathes we have Russell Crowe and Christian Bale - the former in prime, swaggering, alpha-male form as 19th-century Arizona's most notorious outlaw, the latter sensibly underplaying as the quietly-spoken, cash-strapped, family-man rancher tasked with transporting him to the eponymous prison-train. Violent, absorbing complications ensue, all the way to a suitably dramatic - if somewhat plausibility-stretching - finale. 30.9.07 EL COBRADOR - IN GOD WE TRUST : [4/10] : Mex (Mex/Spn/Arg/Brz/Fr/UK) 06 : Paul LeDUC : 90 mins (approx) seen at National Media Museum, Bradford : 26th Sep : public (£5.00) - Bite The Mango Film Festival El Cobrador is based on five stories (by Brazil's Rubem Fonseca) published over the space of 20-odd years - and it doesn't half show. Indeed, what scripter-director Leduc ends up with feels like at least five movies cobbled together - with results that are often amateurishly incoherent, occasionally downright laughable. The three main plot-strands, meanwhile - involving a homicidal fat-cat (Peter Fonda), a mute, homicidal ex-goldminer (Lazaro Ramos) and a foxy, radicalised (but mercifully non-homicidal) photo-journalist (Antonella Costa) - only occasionally combine into something resembling a narrative. Sophomorically glib in its post-9/11 anti-globalisation rhetoric and disorientingly wayward in its tonal shifts, this multi-national co-production squanders what seems to have been an extravagantly generous budget - although, for all its many faults, dull it certainly ain't. 30.9.07 FEAST OF LOVE : [5/10] : US 07 : Robert BENTON : 102 mins (BBFC) seen at Empire, Newcastle : 26th Sep : press show Essentially a TV-movie with an incongruously high-calibre cast - and an even more incongruous "frankness" regarding nudity and sex - Feast of Love transplants Charles Baxter's best-selling novel from Michigan to a leafily semi-suburban Portland. It's here that twinkle-eyed, sad-at-heart professor Morgan Freeman observes coffee-shop owner Greg Kinnear's chaotic private-life, and the sweet-but-ill-fated romance blossoming between two of the latter's youthful employees. Every other line seems to be a homily about love, with cumulatively wearing results - what was presumably wittily wise on the page feels didactically corny on screen. And the mood of inclusive humanism is undermined by (a) the glaringly fleeting screentime devoted to the ensemble's sole non-heterosexual relationship and (b) the end-credits billing of an crewmember as Paul "The Wog" [sic] Fanning. 30.9.07 HALLOWEEN : [3/10] : US 07 : Rob ZOMBIE : 110 mins (BBFC) seen at Empire, Newcastle : 26th Sep : public (£6.80) 2005's The Devil's Rejects boasted sufficient chutzpah and nastiness to suggest that, if Hollywood really had to remake John Carpenter's Halloween, there were many worse candidates for the job than Robert Bartleh Cummings. How horrifying, then, that he should deliver arguably the lamest of the recent slew of horror-remakes - and that includes Rupert Wainwright's ropey (but unfairly-reviled) The Fog. Zombie's Halloween - which differs from Carpenter's by unconvincingly "exploring" the childhood of psychopath Michael Myers (Daeg Faerch [!] as a kid; Tyler Mane as an adult; neither much cop) - is a pointless, dull, strangely un-gory affair, seemingly concocted as an excuse for Zombie to employ numerous genre-veteran character-actors. All are utterly wasted - Udo Kier, god bless him, gets just a single line. Criminal! 30.9.07 REALM AND CONQUEST : [7/10] : actual title Michael Clayton : US 07 : Tony GILROY : 120 mins (BBFC) seen at Empire, Newcastle : 26th Sep : public (£6.80) Long-established as a top-table Hollywood screenwriter - Dolores Claiborne, Armageddon, the Bourne trilogy, etc - Gilroy belatedly takes up directorial duties with this pleasingly oldfashioned, multi-latered character-study-cum-conspiracy-drama. It's produced by several conspicuously award-laden directors, including the film's star George Clooney (plays the Neil Young  NB 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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