Back Catalogue: Reviews 5

Director: Susanne Bier
Producer: Vibeke Windelov, Peter Aalbeck Jensen, Jonas Frederiksen
Screenwriter: Susanne Bier, Anders Thomas Jensen
Cast: Sonja Richter, Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Paprika Steen, Stine Bjerregaard

Anyone who has suffered the trauma and unbearable pain after the loss of a loved one will have a special connection to this story coming to us from Denmark. Loss can have many meanings and here it's a matter of a sudden change of destiny and the disappearance of emotional fulfillment as a result of an accident. Moreover, it's a story that evolves as life does. A horror occurs, the people involved react, the change in situation produces new needs which lead to changes and consequences.

The relationship between the beautiful, sexy Cecilie (Sonja Richter) and her lover Joachim (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) is fun and endearing and we soon care about these people whose bond is expressed by the playful manner in which Joachim asks Cecilie to marry him and how she responds in the affirmative.

The following morning, Cecilie drops Joachim off for a planned trip and, as he springs from the car on the traffic side, is hit by a car. Suddenly, what seemed so sure and positive is wrenched into another dimension.

The woman who was driving the car that struck him immediately stops and tries to render assistance. We learn that she is Marie (Paprika Steen), mother of three and that her teenage daughter Stine (Stine Bjerregaard) (pronounced Steen) was in the car urging her mother to drive faster. Both mother and daughter are devastated by the event, taking their individual share of blame.

Joachim enters surgery at a hospital where Marie's husband Niels (Mads Mikkelsen) is the attending physician. While Cecilie waits for word of the surgery, Niels, at the urging of Marie, goes to her recognising that care giving is a matter for all involved, not just the victim and not just a matter of medicine. Finally, the results come in the form of good news and bad. First, Joachim will live but, second, he is paralysed from the neck down. When the surgeon lays out these facts for Joachim, the realisation of what this means to his and Cecilie's relationship and the life they envisioned registers. Everything has been altered - permanently. It is not mere shock we see on the faces of the characters, but in this dramatically pivotal moment we glimpse the unspoken interior dialogue, the struggle to align a new reality to their existence. In terms of acting, this moment of unspoken meaning alone is worth the price of admission.

Joachim's coping mechanism is to envelop himself in bitterness and the cold rejection of Cecilie. She won't accept it, though, and counters with repeat visits, her protestation of love, and the desire to take care of him always. Finally his demands drive her away and Cecilie is left with searing emptiness at the same time that the comforting relationship with Niels turns into a new, if tentative, fulfillment. Teenage Stine is the first in Niels' family to recognise the meaning behind her father's interest in Cecilie and she becomes the catalyst for a confrontation between her parents.

But what will happen in this marriage as a result? And what will become disrupted if Joachim has a change of heart about seeing Cecilie? The story moves into those ramifications as well as some unexpected ones with deliberate diagnostic detail. A fine understanding of human motivation makes for an absorbing drama laced with a brief dose of humour and a steady drip of irony. Its emotional accuracy suggests that one or both writers (Anders Thomas Jensen and Susanne Bier) have gone through some form of loss in their lifetimes to lend insight into the intricate patterns of behaviour following the trauma of a great change in circumstances. Exploring them is a first rate ensemble of actors.

The production values demonstrate that a well-told story doesn't depend on a big budget. The filmmakers have chosen the minimalist Dogme style. From a filmmaker's perspective, this basis for excusing the low budget is nonsense, and it primarily means that no auxiliary lighting was employed. Cinematographer Morten Søborg turns this to his advantage by artfully using natural light and fast film. The hand-held camerawork, always a distraction, is acceptably done. But, to call it "documentary style" misunderstands the control differences between a scripted drama and the ad libbed, spontaneous nature of the documentary. This is distinctly the former and a fine expression of it if, at nearly two hours, it is a little on the long side.

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What's most distressing about The Core is the complete waste of money, ill-spent on this utter drivel masquerading as valid entertainment.

The 'story' is thus: when the core of our planet stops spinning on its axis a reason is given, though it makes little sense, and a motley crew of hastily-trained scientists must accompany two astronauts (Bruce Greenwood, Hilary Swank) to the Earth's centre so they can jump-start the globe using nuclear weapons.

Casually 'brilliant' college professor Josh Keyes (Aaron Eckhart), a geophysicist who specialises in electromagnetic science, earns his spot aboard the rescue mission by discovering this environmental plight. He brings his findings to smug but respected chain-smoker Dr. Conrad Zimsky (Stanley Tucci), who in turn recruits the intellectually gifted but reclusive Dr. Edward Brazleton (Delroy Lindo). Coincidentally (talk about lack of imagination here, or what?) Brazleton has designed a prototype ship crafted from astonishingly strong materials that can tunnel through rock! Jings, what a surprise! Tcheky Karyo tags along as Eckhart's pal, while DJ Qualls plays a techie nerd teenager whose only responsibility is to attract the 18-24 anorak demographic.

Even after a five-month delay to shore up some key CGI moments, The Core only gets half of its formulas correct. For a science-fiction yarn, it skims over the science and pours on the fiction. And as a special effects extravaganza, its effects just aren't very special. World cities, aka tiny models made to resemble them, crumble under the weight of high-level static discharges and scorching hot microwave rays. If anything, this is consistently amateurish in a non-ironic/ironic charmingly retro sort of way.

No one's got a hope in hell of winning any awards for The Core, though Eckhart deserves credit for his cavalier approach to the clichéd material. He's the only actor who remembers to have some enjoyment. Inevitable love interest Swank (sinking to depths in both the story and her post-Oscar career) is unable to connect with him, which speaks more to her lack of chemistry than his lack of effort. The rest of the cast are caricatures that exist to be eliminated whenever Core wants to unsuccessfully tug the heartstrings instead of ineffectively jolting our seats.

Obviously, audiences aren't looking to The Core for mentally stimulating cinema. This is escapism, but even the sweetest, high-calorie treats should avoid obvious missteps. Five minutes into the film, 32 people in a small city area radius simultaneous drop dead because they have pacemakers. Thirty-two? And they all had pacemakers? In a tiny area? Come on!!

But one scene stands apart from the rest for being just too absurd. It isn't the controversial space shuttle crash landing, which still sends chills, even though it looks terrible. Nor is it the torching of San Francisco, which zips by quite rapidly and then cheats on the after-effects. No, it's a global summit, during which representatives from all the nations of the world agree to keep this mission under wraps, so as not to panic the general public. In light of our current political situations, having seen the amount of hoops the USA and UK had to go through to launch a military campaign, this scene really seems totally far-fetched.

All in all, to quote my home-town of Glasgow's poetic parlance...this is pure ceich.

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Cert: 12a Running time:114 min.

Cast: Al Pacino, Colin Farrell

Screenplay by Roger Towne, Kurt Wimmer and Mitch Glazer
Directed by Roger Donaldson

Hollywood has never much fancied the CIA, typecasting it in film after film as the department of dirty tricks, engine of all that's immoral and wrong-headed in American foreign policy. Now, however, detente has been established.

Maybe the post-September 11 climate is responsible. But agency and industry are talking to one another and The Recruit is one of the results. It's set partly at the CIA training school in Langley, Virginia, and the agency has allowed itself to be consulted in the course of its production. In the words of its new film industry liaison officer, it's time the public knew about "the true heroism, patriotism, honour and integrity of CIA officers".

The first sign that these officers may not be getting quite what they bargained for is the sight of Al Pacino wearing a neatly trimmed goatee.

The rule of thumb with a Pacino persona performance is that the more dishevelled he looks, the more sympathetic his role. And, as CIA training officer Walter Burke, he looks dangerously spruce (apart from some distinctly grotty yellow fingernails near the end). (Come to think of it, Colin Farrell too is particularly manky and clatty throughout..but more of him later.)

But Pacino's Burke is also fearless - especially when it comes to engaging with a cliche. We get a taste of this on his first day in class when he tells the recruits that they've stepped through a looking glass where nothing is as it seems. Then he goes on telling them until this poor little line, which was not too strong to begin with, has had all the remaining life knocked out of it.

One of these attentive recruits is brilliant young MIT graduate James Clayton (Colin Farrell). He's just invented a computer software program that is set to make him obscenely rich at the age of 26, yet when Burke sets out to win him over to the cause, it takes him about two minutes of screen time to give up his glittering commercial prospects for the thankless life of a spy.

Clayton's father, killed in Colombia 10 years before, was almost certainly working for the CIA. If he joins Burke, he believes he'll learn the truth about all this, which means The Recruit is not just a CIA film. It's yet another chapter in Hollywood's long-running romance with father-son relationships.

It's also made by the Australian director Roger Donaldson, now something of a specialist in Washington stories. His last was the gripping 13 Days, about the Kennedy brothers' handling of the Cuban missile crisis, a political cautionary tale so effective that you'd like to think of it as required viewing for all who set foot inside George Bush's Oval Office.

Of course it had a real script, whereas this time, as Pacino has already warned us, Donaldson is consorting with the Mad Hatter.

For a while, he manages to camouflage the story's overall nuttiness with the smoothness of the film's mobile camera work and the quality of its design job. Then the illogicalities start proliferating as arbitrarily as the number of surveillance bugs which the cast keep planting behind one another's coat lapels.

The plot hinges on Clayton's response to the news that Layla (Bridget Moynahan), the fellow recruit with whom he's falling in love, is actually an enemy spy. Which enemy? I have no idea, having become lost in a forest of double and triple crosses.

But Farrell, who's been on the rise since his eye-catching American debut as a Vietnam recruit in Joel Schumacher's tough low budget number Tigerland, manages to keep up.

One measure of an actor is how seriously he can apply himself to junk when required. And he does pretty well. But Pacino clearly thinks he's long since paid his dues on this score and coasts along with tongue in cheek. "Our failures are known. Our successes are not," he intones when elaborating on the all-guts, no-glory career which his recruits have let themselves in for.

And I'm sure the CIA would agree. One thing is certain. The glory's eluded them this time. They've chosen the wrong looking glass.

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Frida tells the fascinating story of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, wife of the famous Mexican artist Diego Rivera (1886-1957), who was an active and vocal member of the Communist Party, an advocate of Socialism in Mexico, an admirer and follower of Vladimir Lenin, and a close friend of Leon Trotsky!

Although Rivera seems universally considered to have been as much a womaniser and philanderer as a great muralist, he apparently was devoted if not strictly faithful to Frida (his third wife, who, to be fair, engaged in a few extramarital liaisons of her own, some of them with women), and very respectful of her artwork, which, according to the screenplay, he often claimed was better than his own.

Starring Salma Hayek, who shines in the title role, and Alfred Molina, equally excellent as Rivera, the film recounts the high and low points of her life and their tumultuous marriagespanning the period between 1922, when she was involved in a devastating tram-car accident in which she received injuries to her lower spine and abdomen that would cause lifelong complications, and her death in 1954.

During that time we witness their first meeting, when, after spending three weeks in a body cast following the accident, she asked Diego to judge her artwork; their trip to New York together, when he was commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller to paint the famously controversial Man At The Crossroads mural, which was subsequently destroyed because of its prominent portrait of Lenin; Fridas pregnancy and miscarriage of their only child together; and the period during which Trotsky was exiled from the Soviet Union by Stalin and stayed (and had a brief extramarital affair) with Frida in 1937; finally culminating with the fulfillment of Fridas lifelong dream of having her works exhibited at a show in her own country of Mexico.

This film is based on the book Frida: A Biography Of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrerra, adapted for the screen by Clancy Sigal, Diane Lake, Gregory Nava, and Anna Thomas. Directed by Julie Taymor, who helmed the critically acclaimed Broadway production of The Lion King as well as the 1999 film version of Shakespeares Titus Andronicus, it is a stylistic masterpiece, using an engaging sense of visual artistry to bring Fridas charismatic and multi-faceted personality to life on the screen.

Using a wild combination of live action, animation, and paintings that seem to come alive, Taymor illustrates the subjective nature of Fridas world as well as her quasi-surrealistic art, showing us how things she might have seen in her mind or felt in her broken body were later translated onto her canvas. For instance, we see the experience which may have led to her painting The Broken Column, one of her many self-portraits, which depicts her bare-breasted, wearing her metal truss, with her spine visible as a crumbling marble pillar, with tears streaming down her face and tiny nails or needles piercing her body. This artwork is emotionally resonant already, but seeing Hayek struggling with the truss, with the pain, and with her conflicting feelings toward her husband, makes it all the more meaningful.

Hayek, who reportedly suffered racist comments from producers in her early career about the likelihood of a Mexican actress being taken seriously in the film world, apparently also suffered more than a little pain herself for the production, not only transforming her famously beautiful appearance to the more plain and ethnic look Frida was famous for (including growing a slight moustache and penciling in a dark monobrow), but also suffering nerve and ligament damage after being attacked by the capuchin monkey playing her pet in the movie. In addition to Hayeks inspired performance, and that of Molina, there are several impressive turns by such supporting players as Edward Norton (Hayeks real-life significant other), who not only played Rockefeller but helped with the script, Geoffrey Rush as Trotsky, Valeria Golino as Diegos ex-wife Lupé, and Antonio Banderas and Ashley Judd as other friends of the couple.

All in all, this film aptly honours one of the most interesting and tragic love stories in the history of art, and erases any doubts about the seriousness of Hayek's technique.

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Charlie/Donald Kaufman: Nicolas Cage
Susan Orlean: Meryl Streep
John Laroche: Chris Cooper
Valerie: Tilda Swinton
Robert McKee: Brian Cox
Amelia: Cara Seymour
Caroline: Maggie Gyllenhaal

Directed by Spike Jonze.

Written by Charlie Kaufman

Being John Malkovich, unarguably one of the most original films of the 90s, was raved about upon release and it ushered in a couple of brilliant new visionaries. First-time feature director Spike Jonze (a music video veteran) was praised for making the leap to Hollywood without bringing the typical music video style (that most of his ilk brings) with him. The person that got the most attention however was Charlie Kaufman, whose way out-there, though brilliant screenplay was the key reason that Malkovich was so unique and memorable.

During the time that Malkovich was wrapping production, Kaufman was hired to adapt Susan Orlean's non-fiction book The Orchid Thief into screenplay form. After the lunacy of Malkovich, Kaufman was ready to try something different and was totally up for this challenge. Once he read and re-read (and read again) the complicated account of collector/poacher John Laroche and his obsessions for flowers, fish and other strange things, Kaufman realized that he'd bitten off a great deal more than he could chew; The Orchid Thief was unadaptable and, therefore, unfilmable. There was no way that he could turn this rambling book into anything resembling a film without adding such Hollywood conventions as drugs, sex and car chases, and he wasn't willing to sensationalise the material. After an extremely dark period of self-doubting and self-loathing, he came up with a brilliant idea and decided to write himself into his script. Instead of hammering out a straightforward adaptation, Kaufman's latest would focus on his inner demons and the struggles he had in adapting such a monster.

The above, in a nutshell, is Adaptation. (the full-stop is part of the title!) To give anything more than this piece of background information would be to ruin what is easily the most original film since the last time these two wackos (Kaufman and Jonze) got together.

As wonderful and unique as the story and direction are, without the top-notch work of the accomplished cast (all working at the top of their game), it would all be for nothing. Nicolas Cage is a revelation as Charlie (and his twin brother Donald), giving his second best performance to date (Leaving Las Vegas is a personal favourite and Cage devastated in the lead role.) In Adaptation Cage plays dual roles and produces a masterful job of giving each of them their own personality and there is never any doubt at any time as to which brother is on screen.

Charlie has a bleak outlook on life and suffers from paranoia and self-loathing, while Donald (a far more commercial writer) is confident and positive about seemingly everything. Pulling off one of these performances would be a great feat, but Cage excels in both. Strangely enough, both Charlie and Donald (a fictional character) Kaufman are credited with the film's screenplay and I can't wait to see what happens when both names are read on Oscar night (since this will assuredly win one of the two screenplay awards, though I think it deserves to win in both the adapted and original categories!).

For the first two-thirds, the film alternates between scenes of Kaufman trying to write the adaptation and Orlean researching and writing an article for the New Yorker, the basis for her book. In these scenes (which take place 3 years before the stuff with Kaufman), Meryl Streep as Orlean and Chris Cooper (a spellbinding performance) as Laroche are great together and they provide the film with some much-needed humour missing from the Kaufman segments.

Both storylines are well handled and Jonze does an admirable job of moving back and forth between the two without ever distracting attention. Although Cage's Charlie looms large over all of the proceedings, all three leads share an equal amount of screen time and are given some great support from the awesome Brian Cox as screenwriter Robert McKee who provides both brothers with some guidance. Ron Livingston (with the year's funniest lines) as Charlie's agent and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Donald's girlfriend are marvellous too. All of these performances are sharp and help add some colour and flavour to the story.

This is a wonderful new film (which actually made me run out right after and pick up the Being John Malkovich DVD) about the power of the pen and I eagerly await the next Jonze/Kaufman project. In fact Kaufman's latest is his adaptation of Chuck Barris' Confessions of a Dangerous Mind directed by George Clooney - reviewed here very soon!

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DIRECTOR: Gore Verbinski.
CAST: Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson, David Dorfman.

A big-budget American remake of a Japanese sensation, The Ring is based on the premise of a cursed video that causes anyone who sees it to die within a week. The problem is not the content of the video (a collection of disconnected black and white images that suggests a surreal editing experiment from the late 1920s), but its anonymous author. Through the course of the film, it becomes apparent that the video was literally ghost-written - by a malevolent spirit determined to spread its psychic imprint like a virus on the living population.

DreamWorks's The Ring, directed by Gore Verbinski, feels ghost-written in quite a different way: At best, it's a workmanlike, passably engrossing horror flick that copies well from the Japanese original. When it's good, it's not original, and when it's original, it's not so good.

Director Hideo Nakata's original Ringu (1998), based on a novel by Koji Suzuki, had a spooky linearity in its tale of a woman journalist who tries to find the source of a series of teen deaths, including that of her niece. There are much more artistically accomplished and dread-filled Japanese horror films (Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure and Pulse) but Ringu has a pop kick (it spawned two sequels), with its vision of a modern Japan of divorced professional mothers, cellphones and videotape, haunted by its past, represented by a remote volcanic island, where malignant spirits lie in wait.

In its opening scene, The Ring is a £40 million film that does a reasonably good impression of a low-budget teen horror. This is especially true of the prelude (borrowed directly from the Japanese original), which features plaid-skirted teenaged girls alone in a house, talking about sex and urban myths.

Quickly, though, it switches gears and, initially, there's a happy surprise in the casting. Australian actress Naomi Watts (Mulholland Drive) is the perfectly updated Hitchcockian heroine, a plucky single mother, Rachel Keller, with her emotions well in check. The sad-eyed David Dorfman is distressingly credible as her semi-neglected eight-year-old son, Aidan, whose teacher is worried about his distressingly death-themed drawings.

One of the girls in the prelude, Katie, was Rachel's niece and Aidan's babysitter, and now she has mysteriously died, along with several of her classmates. At the girl's wake, Rachel begins asking questions and traces the tape back to a rustic motel cabin, where the teenagers went to a party.

Rachel drives up to the motel, under a gloomy sky, and (far too incredibly) finds the actual video cassette in reception, sitting box-less on a shelf(!) She snaffles in into her bag, watches it in the rentashack, gets the phone call and starts to worry. In her anxiety, she turns to her ex-husband, Noah (Martin Henderson), a nerdy video-technician,curiously/conveniently. Despite a slapdash investigation, Rachel finds some pieces of a puzzle: a video image of a lighthouse that she traces to a local island, the location of a horse farm where the horses went mad.

There she meets Brian Cox, the remaining figure from a family where things went very badly, but the scene is puzzling. Cox (the original Hannibal in Michael Mann's Manhunter) is large, wet-lipped and rheumy-eyed and, hell yes, he's scary. But there's just no particular logic as to why he needs to be that way in the story.

Screenwriter Ehren Kruger fails to provide anything beyond one-dimensional characters without background history, a large lapse for a fairly ambitious movie. Given that the entire ghost narrative is related to the effect of a disturbed marriage on a child, it would make sense to offer a titbit or two about Rachel's own failed marriage. Without real-life grounding, the characters seem little more than functionaries in an elaborate, baffling, paranoid fantasy.

That being said, there are at least a couple of genuinely skin-crawling scenes in The Ring. The first (a narrative red herring) is a jolting sequence when a stallion goes mad on a ferry boat.

The second, lifted directly from the original movie, is the culmination of the movie's double-climax, which is best not described in detail. As in David Cronenberg's Videodrome, it involves a television image made flesh. Though The Ring is only a copy, it still can carry the echo of a real chill.

Drama, Cert 15, 119 mins, Dir: Peter Mullan
With: Dorothy Duffy, Geraldine McEwan, Nora-Jane Noone, Eileen Walsh.

Given its unpleasant subject matter and bleak nature, "The Magdalene Sisters" is a hard film to 'love', however this unflinching drama, is superbly well-acted by a marvellous cast, excellently written and directed by Glasgow actor Peter Mullan, and is a searing indictment of organised religion and its attendant atrocities.

It reveals the true story of the Magdalene Asylums, prison-like detention centres run by the Irish Catholic church to punish women who were perceived to be sinners - a term whose definition was stretched far beyond reason.

It follows three young women sent to repent within the walls of one such institution: Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) who was raped by a cousin and is blamed for the incident, Patricia (Dorothy Duffy) who had a baby out of wedlock and Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone) who was believed to possess lusty thoughts about boys. All three are shipped to an asylum, where they are stripped (literally and figuratively) of their dignity, independence and human rights.

Emotionally and physically abused by the nuns, the women join the ranks of the penitents - who range in age from teenagers to the elderly - and prepare to spend the rest of their lives doing hard labour, being punished for transgressions they didn't commit.

Led by the terrifying Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan in a deliciously hateful role), the nuns preside over the women like wardens, routinely subjecting their charges to humiliation such as having them stand naked for a contest to see which of them has the biggest breasts, fattest bum, etc. The women, in turn, make attempts at rebellion, but with each effort the audience cringes - knowing of the torture to follow should it fail.

The film, which Peter Mullan says barely touches on the horrors experienced at the asylums, has been condemned by the Catholic church. And it's easy to see why: exposing the disturbing truths about the church's methods of reforming its "sinners" doesn't exactly smack of a winning P.R. campaign. Most of the actresses in the film, who were culled from community theatre groups, are all remarkable, and Nora-Jane Noone (as the fiery Bernadette) especially excells. However, the most powerful performance of all comes from Eileen Walsh for her poignant portrayal of simple-minded and long-suffering Crispina. Utterly convincing and heart-rendingly sublime.

This is unquestionably difficult to watch, but The Magdalene Sisters nonetheless delivers a sobering look at one of the Catholic church's biggest, and most horrific, mistakes... especially considering the last such asylum was still in operation as recently as 1996 before finally being shut down. Amen to that.
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