Sophie Scholl: The final days (Sophie Scholl - Die letzten Tage) (DVD) 2005

University students make excellent protesters and activists; Max Weber would have argued that university students, by virtue of their privileged position as state-sponsored intellectuals, are morally bound to be protesters and activists against the state. Yet there exists a problem of evil in academia: Why, if there is a moral duty to protest, do most students across nations and cultures remain largely apathetic?

Such is the uncomfortable position the members of the White Rose society find themselves in, during the final year of World War II. While the immorality of the war and Germany's impending defeat is clear to Sophie Scholl and her collaborators, it is likely that the general silence, fear or even apathy in the German public and their classmates provide that impetus towards their daring acts of resistance. We're not talking about terrorist acts or sabotage here, but a coordinated effort to blanket major German cities with fiercely written, relentlessly logical, and morally couched anti-Hitler missives. (Where else do you think "impeach him, impeach him now!!! came from?)

Understandably, the Gestapo is not amused and when the happy group make a mistake during the dissemination of their 6th pamphlet, Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans are in for a world of pain. To be more exact, the high treason leading to capital punishment type of pain.

Much of this movie is set in the Munich Stadelheim Prison, where criminologist Robert Mohr interrogates Sophie Scholl over many sessions. This sort of set up normally makes for a good play and a bad movie; coupled with Julia Jentsch's too-reverent portrayal of the title character as a diffident and moralistic political martyr, it is a surprise that Sophie Scholl is as watchable as it ends up.

Here's a rule of thumb: political martyrs come across as less sympathetic the more they are self-assured of the justness of their cause. Simply put, the smugness that comes along with young political martyrs barely into their 20s tends to alienate them from the viewer, as well as run counter to good storytelling. And when the Garden of Gethsemane moment comes for the young girl, we feel that far too much of the movie has set her up as a smooth operator and knowing martyr: her self-doubt and true fear ring strangely false.

What saves this movie comes from Gerald Alexander Held as the sympathetic interrogator who seems hell-bent on finding an escape clause for the girl despite having to do his duty as a political officer, as well as betray a certain lack of confidence in his cause. While Sophie Scholl is a known, unwavering moral entity, the movie rides on the shoulders of Held's Robert Mohr, and flies on the wings of Andre Hennicke's very shrill and even more smug high judge Friesler.

As a movie based on historical events and personages, Sophie Scholl: The final days seems to hold its heroine on too high a pedestal to tell a story, and even to attempt a truer story.

The clues lie in the extra features on the DVD, which contain historical interviews with the survivors of the White Rose society, and family and friends of the Scholls. I'll put it simply: there has been a fair amount of whitewashing in the telling of this story. The real Sophie Scholl was a very more humane and human character than the political martyr we are presented with; and contrary to the expectations of Sophie Scholl, the reaction in the universities to the execution of the White Rose society members was that of either apathy or approval.

It's as though these university students and their descendants have a serious case of "let's pretend most of us intellectuals and survivors of that era didn't break out the champagne or continued to be apolitical when the heroes were executed" guilt, and the very turgid political martyr of Sophie Scholl was created.

While acknowledging the problematic concept and storytelling of this movie, I would just like to say that however compromised it is, this movie still shows clearly why it is immoral and wrong for students to resort to violence and terrorism, even to protest against an unpopular and unjust war. Yes, I'm talking to you, Bill Ayers.

Good Shepherd, The (DVD) (2007)

As a high concept non-action spy thriller (no car chases! no explosions! no showdowns with bowler hat tossing henchmen!) The Good Shepherd is something best watched on DVD. Robert De Niro and Eli Roth fully deserve their Oscar nomination with this movie, but due to its non-action status and running length, it is best appreciated in your favourite cushion at home, with a glass of Chardonnay in your hand. And any tome on American history written by Noam Chomsky by your side - you might end up consulting its pages more often as the movie progresses.

Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) is the central character, and the movie spirals around his role in two periods in American intelligence history - the years leading to the creation of the CIA, and his role in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and its aftermath. The most audacious thing that Roth's script does is to turn the spy genre on its head. It's not a furious denouncement of the failure and corrupting nature of American intelligence at all (and one might argue that perhaps its subtlety and very understated criticisms may have cost it the crowdpleasing quality that a major Oscar contender should have). Instead of say, a generic angry denouncement or an overblown morality tale of innocence lost, the script of The Good Shepherd surprising and audacious, stripping both Yale's Bone and Skulls secret society (which provided both candidates for the 2004 US presidential election!) and the CIA of their aura, mystery, and mythology ever so effectively. According to De Niro and Roth, what damns these two elite institutions together is the fact that the secret rituals and cloak and daggers are nothing more than grown-up boys recreating their atavistic love for playground games, Hardy Boys novels, and the whole need to be approved by the select few. In other words, behind the two most powerful secret societies of the modern world lies a petty juvenile impulse.

Better yet, the duo further damn the CIA and their patriotic subterfuge by stripping the spy game of its heroics and excitement - Edward Wilson, his masters, collaborators, and enemies could very well be faceless, boring bureaucrats who work in offices full of cabinets and boxes - little insignificant men who use domestic housework terms to describe their spy operations, very little men of little heart and stature who must imagine they are doing a greater duty, who call their skills the "dark craft", as though they are in some Harry Potter movie. And of course, these heroic bureaucrats, these masters of the dark craft are responsible for their complete and utter failure at Cuba.

Perhaps because of its high concept and the dedication of the director and scriptwriter to the original premise, the end result is The Good Shepherd turns out to be the least exciting spy movie in existence. It is most a series of anticlimaxes, disappointments, and as lethargic as watching a few good men wasting their lives away in a two and a half hour film. Because this movie moves and plays more like a hefty 4-part miniseries, you might want to watch this DVD a little by little, but I assure you the genius and subtlety of the story will seep through by the end.

DVD review

Most Oscar nominees and winners of 2007 got what I call the "rush to DVD" treatment, where in some unholy haste to sell these movies to home audiences, DVD publishers and distributors have chosen to produce frills-free basic DVD packages. The Good Shepherd lacks a director and scriptwriter commentary track (most disappointing, I know), as well as what I consider almost compulsory: a featurette on the life and career of James Angleton, the CIA chiefs whom Edward Wilson is based on.

What we have as form of compensation are 7 deleted scenes, which are all worth watching. An entire subplot was taken away, as well as more buildup towards the breakdown of Edward Wilson's marriage. The last deleted scene feels like an alternate ending, and I suspect some might find it a far more appropriate way to end the movie than what De Niro has chosen. There's no fatal flaw in these deleted scenes at all, and I rather suspect that if included in the final cut of the film, it would make the total runtime for a 4-part mini-series.

First published at incinemas on 3 July 2007

Shadow Man (DVD) (2006)

If it’s a Steven Seagal action movie, you could reasonably expect a few things right off the bat, like:

1. Seagal will play an ex-CIA/mercenary/cop
2. He will battle rogue or foreign government/army/police units
3. Who have either murdered or kidnapped a close family member
4. FIGHT!

That’s about as simple as the Steven Seagal actioner goes, really, and Shadow Man does not fall far from the formula. Here, Seagal is an ex-CIA agent who is now enjoying life as a CEO of a Fortune 500 company – we don’t really know what he does, but he seems to make a fortune from teaching aikido, a mystical martial art that allows practioners to punch holes in the internal organs of any opponent with a single strike. It’s quite mystifying because presumably you need volunteers in order to teach that (“Sensei, I want to learn how to poke a hole in my opponent’s torso with a taichi move!” “Okay Wang. Stand still and I’ll demonstrate on you.”).

More mystifying is the fact that his old CIA colleagues, an entire criminal underground, and a crooked foreign law enforcement system want to bring Jack Foster (totally generic name, which is why we’ll stick to STEVEN SEAGAL for the rest of this review!) back into the game by slipping some top-secret deadly biological warfare agent into his handphone, kidnap his daughter, and strand both of them in a seedy East European country (Romania, to be exact). Obviously, they’re all itchy for some exploding internal organs action. That or they’re clearly out of their minds!

Fast moving and tight (after all, genre movies – action thrillers, spy thrillers, wuxia – involve lots of condensation and narrative shortcuts that leave out the tedious exposition needed to help audiences connect the dots), Seagal is a man on a mission, expertly dodging assassins, double-crosses, and mowing down opponents in a single-minded search for his missing daughter.

Shadow Man is a straight to DVD release, but in actual fact, it is one of Steven Seagals better movies of the past 5 years. The man has been in a slump, he’s grown fat, but here you can see the improvement in acting, slightly better charisma, and a higher percentage of pure fighting scenes than in his last few movies. It’s not just the aikido, but the sheer imaginativeness of the fight scenes – I haven’t really seen anyone else aside from the A-Team assemble a rocket launcher, an explosive, and a getaway vehicle from household parts, but Steven Seagal does 2 out of 3, in an entertaining effort.

Of course, the acting from most of Seagal’s co-stars is bad or hammy, the dubbing is obvious, and the aikido fighting, bordering on the fantastical, is an acquired taste (but so is wuxia action!), but remember: Steven Seagal does his own stunts! And he’s the only actor who has a body double engaged for non-action scenes! Priceless viewing if you’re a B-grade action movie fan armed with a remote control with a pause button.

First published at incinemas on 9 June 2007

Stick It (DVD) (2006)

You'd be tempted to tell the director to Stick It too

Stick It comes to us direct to DVD because its target audience is pretty limited. I suppose the market for a sports comedy that involves anti-authoritarian, punk-rock posturing brimming over the top with attitude (or attitood") and a fervent believe that infantile rebellion is the path to salvation would probably be defined to a certain writer who makes a living from her pink-themed, foul penned, brutally honest blog, and the few hundred people who look to her as some sort of a role model. The problem, though, is that Wendy Chong has far more authenticity and real attitude in her stick-on nailed pinky than Jessica Bendinger has in this movie.

Let's review: Jessica Bendinger, in her first screenwriting debut, wrote Bring It On, a full of attitude teenage rebellion authority-thumbing comedy about the sport of cheerleading. It was an unexpected hit, which may explain why Bendinger, failing to get any directing or writing spots on the other 3 Bring It On direct-to-DVD sequels, has apparently decided to remake Bring It On, transposing the rebellious teens, the strait-laced coach, and even the corrupt, narrowminded judging committee to a different sport - gymnastics, in this case.

I'm not sure why this can't possibly work, but perhaps it's because Bendinger gets far too lazy with her script, or because she's out of her depth in her directorial debut. To distract you from her utter lack of familiarity with the dynamics of real life gymnastics, Bendinger attempts to pad the film with as much teenspeak posturing by the rebellious heroine or her brainless but catty antagonists as possible, creating as many outlandish and childishly-conceived showdowns between heroine and oppressive authoritarian figures as possible, and when there are sports sequences, what passes for gymnastics routines are actually impossible in real life, but achieved through liberal use of CGI.

Because Bendinger has absolutely no knowledge of the real sport of gymnastics, apparently no intention of actually finding out what goes on at gymnastics competitions and training programmes, and no respect whatsoever for her subject matter, it is no wonder then that the punk-rebellion feel of Stick It rings so false, so hollowly, and so vacuously. If you're in the mood for a real teen rebellion sports comedy, it is a better idea to rent Bring It On, and if you're in the mood for a rebellious gymnastics sports movie that actually knows what it's talking about, you might like to try Personal Best, starring Mariel Hemmingway and Scott Glenn.

First published at incinemas on 8 June 2007

Shrek 2 (DVD) (2004)

I assume you’re up to date with the premise of the original Shrek movie, no? Well, just to recap, the Shrek franchise takes your familiar fairy tales and gives them a spin by overturning the genre, inverting stereotypes, and injecting a strong dose of pop culture references. And what you get is an animation that plays like a subversive comedy for adults, but has the CGI design, action sequences that will appeal to children.

Now, when we last watched Shrek, the unfriendly green ogre managed to save Princess Fiona from the dragon and the castle and all that jazz, wins her hand, and undoes the curse that has been afflicted her for years. Now, in Shrek 2, it’s time for the newlyweds to meet the bride’s parents, who rule the kingdom of Far Far Away. Needless to say, Fiona’s parents aren’t quite enamoured of their daughter marrying an ogre, much less becoming one, and desperate measures are enacted by the King (John Cleese) to salvage the situation – a device that introduces more wacky characters into the Shrek series such as the Fairy Godmother (Jennifer Saunders from Ab Fab as a celebrity godmother!), the self-absorbed Prince Charming (Rupert Everett) whom Fiona was actually meant to marry, and Puss in Boots, the king’s assassin and Shrek’s new hilarious talking animal sidekick.

Normally, movie trilogies tend to from the law of diminishing returns, but the Dreamworks team appears to stave off the decline by sticking true to their original subversive formula and amping the pop culture satire here – if you though Disney icons were skewered by Shrek 1, wait till you see what the Dreamworks team do to Hollywood and popular TV!

First published at incinemas on 22 May 2007

Peter Pan (DVD) (1953)

What a timely release of the platinum edition of Peter Pan! For one thing, Disney Animation Studios had recently announced its decision to overturn its wrongheaded decision to abandon traditional (read 2D) animation - what better way to celebrate this than releasing a platinum edition for all the Walt Disney Classics? The only possible cure for people who are convinced that 3D animation is the wave of the future, and that traditional animation is just hopelessly déclassé, who have never seen the wonders that Studio Ghibli trots using that outdated medium, is to let them watch the old classics again.

But hasn't everyone watched Peter Pan before? Surely on an old television broadcast, or on a VHS tape in the 1980s - but for the platinum edition, DVD visuals have been restored - dirty spots in degrading prints cleaned up, but not intrusively enhanced - while the audio has been remastered to 5.1 Dolby sound. The result may be more farreaching than you think: for once, it is possible to view this movie as Walt Disney and audiences in 1952 did. It certainly is easier now to see what's so great about Peter Pan (and the rest of the classics) - there's a kind of magical fluidity to movements, a complex choreography that seems more and more rare despite the technical advancements that 3D animation offers. There's the marriage of incidental music and pop music of the day to film sequences that just isn't done anymore (changes in musical taste may have something to do with it). And there's the strange realisation that somehow, backgrounds and characters, even though composed using traditional, visually boring, 2D ("flat") methods, can impart a sense of wonderment, of imagination beyond the over-literal mode of CGI.

And this is what the platinum edition of Peter Pan promises: a return to eternal wonderment, the evocation of magic, the eternal childhood. The story may feel dated - no thanks to our more politically correct age where it's not cool to depict Indians as gutteral-voiced, slope faced tomtom-banging hunters, and no thanks to a certain entertainer who has turned "Neverland" into a name of ill repute - but the animation technique creating challenges for animators in complex yet unflashy sequences and the beauty of well-composed music will speak to audiences' hearts through the ages, for yet another 50 years.

DVD review

Walt Disney thought very highly of JM Barrie's Peter Pan, taking more than 10 years to produce it with a gargantuan committee of animators, writers, artists, and live action models before he gave the go-ahead. The special features on the platinum edition make full use of currently available material from the Disney archives, and it shows.

On Disc 1, the commentary is not so much on what is happening right there and then in the animation, but it is a series of interviews by various voice-over artists, animators, scriptwriters and many many people involved in the decade-long production process. Some of these interviews or reminiscences have been recorded years ago, others are brand new. There's alot of stuff to entertain and inform adults revisiting this classic, animation history buffs - mostly because all the commentors have the benefit of decades separating their interviews with their roles in the film.

Disc 2 has all sorts of goodies for the animation historian. Under "Backstage Disney" are 6 features, each 7 to 15 minutes long, about the history and mechanics of making Peter Pan. Of note is "You can fly", which compares Disney's animated feature to previous stage productions. You'll appreciate the innovativeness of Walt Disney even more after watching this one. Also an eye-opening is "The Peter Pan that almost was", which has an alternate opening sequence and other deleted scenes - some in almost-completed stage, others in storyboard form - thanks to the fact that Walt Disney took his time to fully think through the script and experiment with ideas before fully committing them to film.

Everything that can possibly be in this platinum disc is here, except for the live-action model videos which the Disney animators shot to help them study and realise the characters on film. Footages of these videos are few and far in between, appearing in various featurettes on disc 2, but they're extremely good. One hopes that the full videos can be found in some buried corner of the Disney archives one day, so that the studio can release an ultimate version!

First published at incinemas on 21 May 2007

Good Year, A (DVD) (2006)

Stunt casting alert!

A Good Year is a fine piece of movie that relies on stunt casting as its central gimmick. Russell Crowe, known everywhere as the burly, manly actor who appears on-screen in ultra-masculine roles (a Roman general, a captain of a ship, a boxer) in action flicks, and who gets into fights with people off screen. Stunt casting occurs twice here, when for some reason, Russell Crowe is cast as a lead in a mellow romantic comedy that directed by Ridley Scott. This is doubly gimmicky, because A Good Year is an adaptation of a novel by Peter Mayle, the writer of the "Life in Provence" series of books, about a former English go-getter investor who finds a second, more humane and relaxed life in France.

To wit: Russell Crowe plays a lying, cheating, cold-hearted stock investor who makes lots of money. Everyone in London financial circles is jealous of his competence, everyone hates his guts, and everyone secretly wants to be like him. When news of the passing of his favourite uncle (a man who went native as a winemaker in Provence decades ago) reaches him, Max Skinner does the only sensible thing to the vineyard where he spent his best childhood summers at. Yes, the talented corporate raider intends to give the aging walls a fresh coat of paint, pass off its substandard wines as vintage microbrews, and sell the place - lock stock and barrel - to the highest, unsuspecting bidder.

Given that this is a romantic comedy, do not be surprised when the character everyone loves to hate suddenly undergoes a personality change and morphs into Mr Nice Guy before the movie is over. And given its pedigree as an entry in the Provence series, do not be surprised when Mr Moneybags gets overwhelmed by the provincial Provencal culture, its fiery women, fine wines and lush sunshine reflected in golden hues from leaves, and turns into Mr Sensitive Guy.

This is a movie that you'll either love or hate, really. There's Russell Crowe playing completely against type, matched only by director Ridley Scott directing against type. There's the whole improbable self-transforming experience story whose smugness can only be matched by the "cute little exotic French rural province" story that Peter Mayle is equally and strongly loved or reviled for. Sure, all the Oscar-worthy acting chops of Russell Crowe and Albert Finney are here, as is Ridley Scott's directorial excellence (do watch out for the brilliant colours of provincial France!) - but what really bought me into this movie was the unaffected story, set as flashbacks from Max Skinner's childhood. The interplay between Freddie Highmore and Albert Finney brings to mind the quality of childhood, and the nostalgia one gets from recalling scenes from childhood. If you have no problems with the stunt casting and the genre itself, A Good Year is a surprisingly Good Movie.

DVD review

Very tastefully done is Postcards from Provence. You can either, in the old style of embedded videos, switch to the mini-features in the middle of the movie at certain cues, or view the mini-features on their own through the Special Features menu. Through providing behind the camera footage of key scenes, Ridley Scott talks about the great cast of actors in the movie while showing how film production works. One thing you'll notice is that the director's commentary continues after those scenes and trails off halfway - it's all part of the full-movie director commentary, which of course isn't included in our local region-release DVD. It's an extremely annoying effect, and frankly, if you bothered enough to watch these features - which are basically director commentaries and videos - you'd be interested enough to give the full-movie director commentary a spin.

The music videos are fascinating enough - it's not quite well-known that Russell Crowe had a career as a rock singer. The 3 music videos feature original music by "Russell Crowe and The Ordinary Fear of God". Okay, Mr Crowe is a decent enough rock singer, and his band seem to be melodically inclined... but we suggest the actor has far greater talent in acting...

First published at incinemas on 14 May 2007

Method (DVD) (2004)

The saying goes, there's no such thing as a bad film, only a badly made film. I humbly submit Method to you as my sole exhibit to prove my case. To be up front with you, Method is a failure of a film. It's not a failure because of its premise, which is simply: "(Method) actor immerses herself too deeply in role, becomes the serial killer she portrays". You see, the premise is a bunch of hokey, but in the right hands (director, scriptwriter, actors), it could turn out to be high camp or excellent drama (see Willem Dafoe and John Malkovich in Shadow of the Vampire). In the able hands of Brad Wyman, Katie L Fetting, and Elizabeth Hurley, though, the result is more of an accidentally-funny farce of a thriller, and a valuable lesson for all aspiring directors, scriptwriters, and actors. Join me now as we gaze upon the destruction that the merrily untalented trio have wrought... so that you can solemnly swear never to repeat their errors when it's your turn to make a movie. Or decide to rent, borrow, or buy this DVD.

The director: Now, if you have a premise like this, you'd want to make sure that the movie looks credible. But there's no way you can achieve that if we keep seeing over the top hallucinatory sequences where the actress is brainwashed by her imagination of the dead serial killer character she's supposed to play, mixed with over the top fantasy sequences where the actress may or may not be killing off extras and cast members on the set in a fit of dotty madness, and further mixed with very cheesey period footage of the "film" within the film of the movie about the serial killer. In general, any one of these elements will turn a good thriller into a joke; congratulations to Brad Wyman for hitting the jackpot thrice!

The writer: You could either write a deliberately bad thriller movie or you could write a good thriller about an actress losing her mind on the set of a very bad movie. If you wanted to do the former, you'd have the dialogue in the period film within a film be as stilted, cheesey, and elaborate as the dialogue in the rest of the film, but you'd do it with a heavy sense of self-aware humour. If you wanted to do the latter, you'd have to make sure that the actual movie outside the period reenactment is free of over-the-topness. Katie L Fetting succeeds in avoiding both, and creates a mess of a script.

The star: Unfortunately, Elizabeth Hurley is not an actress. More unfortunate for the viewer of the DVD is the painfully obvious fact that she isn't even a performer. She can't even pull off an impression of a bad actress, not to say a woman on the brink of madness.

Reviewer's advice: This film could have been saved if some other character were cast in this role, or if the writer were smart enough to realise that by injecting completed, post-production footage of the film-within-the-film, it implies a certain sort of conclusion about the film. This movie is perfect for a bunch of oversmart movie buffs in need of a great laugh and a fun party game (drink a beer whenever you spot a script/directing crime!).

First published at incinemas on 17 April 2007

Children of Men (DVD) (2006)

One of the Oscar-worthy films not in running for a Best Picture Oscar

It is a rare occasion that a film could be nominated for 2 of the most prestigious Oscar categories, and yet not see a general release in cinemas here. I speak of Children of Men. Consider its nominations for best adapted screenplay and editing - by all means, it means that this is simply one of the best written and filmmed movies of the year. In fact, it's an even rare occasion that a film nominated for writing and editing would not receive the automatic third nomination for Best Picture as well, so don't take it as hyperbole when I say that this movie is one of the most underrated and underappreciated gems of last year. Perhaps the short shrift given to Children of Men might come from the fact that it's a science fiction flick, and therefore not a serious movie. LOTR may have broken ceilings, but its anomalous success at the Oscars is the exception that proves the rule that fantasy, sci-fi and horror movies aren't serious enough to be seen as legitimate contenders for the Best Picture award. Watching this DVD though, it becomes apparent that Children of Men deserves more than it got; it deserves to be watched.

Children of Men is a sci-fi flick that takes place in a dystopian future world where for reasons unknown, humanity has lost its ability to reproduce. No new babies have been born for decades, not because people don't have the time to have them, but because women simply stopped getting pregnant no matter how hard they tried. Of course, society has been greying and birth rates have been falling for decades, but imagine if that were irreversible! Dystopian fiction is one of the major tropes of futuristic science fiction, but from the start, this movie already shows it's not going to be the same old, same old. For one, you'll notice that Children of Men takes place in a world that's not too far different from our own, whose politics aren't very much different from what we see around us, except that it's a world that's in the middle of the slow apocalypse, the extinction of mankind. That's a set of concerns that are as far removed as possible from the standard, almost required, dystopian lineup of authoritarian regimes (Sleeper, Brazil, 1984, Gattaca) and their political screeds on the struggle between individuality and freedom against dictatorship. It's a set of concerns that shepherd the movie towards the real and the realistic, to show ordinary life as it is lived in a world that's seen better days, away from the surface razzle-dazzle production set-focused sci-fi films of late.

Cuaron employs his favourite road trip narrative to accentuate the shift towards realism and the nitty gritty in his sci-fi film. After a heavily pregnant refugee woman is found, several underground groups must ferry her to a safe refuge where an almost mythical organisation of scientists work to restore the viability of the human race. The road trip, of course, is merely a launching point for the Cuaron to direct our attention to his broad sweeps of a society living within the slow apocalypse, visiting various factions like the apolitical citizenry, the privileged elites, the disaffected revolutionaries, the corrupt and the selfless. It's an almost documentary-like approach that is well served by his choice of cinema verite cinematography and astonishing use of very long single takes. Up front, what is more terrifying than the apocalypse or living through it, is the idea that mankind will be just as full of follies, hopes and ugliness as before; humanity won't be much changed for the better or for the worse by the prospects of its impending decline and fall.

Most sci-fi films end on by either overdoing the bleakness and despair, copping out on a sugar-coated Pollyanna-ish ending, or an orgy of revolutionary chaos. It is evidence of the brilliance of Cuaron and his scriptwriters that Children of Men may well be one of the rare sci-fi films that has a completely ambiguous ending where you won't know if there's a happy, sad, or nihilistic ending. That, plus the incredible talent displayed in its screenplay, camerawork, and editing, is reason why you should rent or even buy this DVD.

DVD Review

Typical of recent movies, the DVD of Children of Men was rushed out shortly after the Oscar nomination list was announced. What's good about this is that audiences all over the world get to see a film that may not have been released in local cinemas; what's bad is that audiences all over the world tend to get a DVD that has no extras whatsoever - and wonder why the major disappointment, given that far lesser movies (#1 in US box office for all of 2 weeks) get DVD releases with the full set of extra features (including director's commentary audio tracks!) barely 3 months after their run in the cinemas. What's promising abou the Children of Men DVD is the inclusion of one extra feature, a documentary that dwelves into the top-class cinematography used in the movie.

It's best to watch this feature ("Men Under Attack") immediately after finishing the movie - only then will you realise that the movie was so well-told that the camerawork - even though it was impressive - may have gone largely unnoticed. Of course, the feature provides the shock and awe so you can marvel at just how well-filmmed this movie is.

First published at incinemas on 9 April 2007

See No Evil (DVD) (2006)

And then, the powerslam!

It's all about the past. Like how, before he became a professional wrestler called Kane, Glen Thomas Jacobs used to be a very nice and decent looking junior high school teacher. Or how, before he made his first feature film, director Gregory Dark used to direct pornographic films before producing music videos for the likes of Snoop Dogg. The past comes back to haunt us all the time, in other words, and it is no less true for the characters in See No Evil: there's the policeman haunted by his narrow escape not so long ago from a giant hook-wielding serial killer, the delinquent charges of the policeman are haunted by their past of crimes and misdemeanors while they are stuck cleaning up an aged motel as part of a reform programme, and the gigantic crazed hook-wielding serial killer himself is haunted by memories of his childhood as he haunts the motel's secret passages, as well as being haunted by a huge bullet wound at the back of his head, courtesy of the policeman who through a stroke of luck (good for the killer, bad for the policeman) is at the motel with his charges.

Goodness knows how bad or naughty these convicts can really be if they're allowed to clean up a motel as part of their reformation, but surely the awful way they behave to each other is supposed to make audiences relish and look forward to their eventual exits from the film, courtesy of the giant crazed killer. I'm not going to pretend that this film even works as a slasher flick, because surely you're reading this review now with a copy of the DVD in your hand because KANE is the killer.

Nobody expects Kane to be Anthony Perkins, so I'll just cut to the chase: does Kane dispatch his victims in a style that is deserving of his pro wrestler status and legendary name? The answer is somewhere in between - Kane performs chokeholds, bodyslams, flings victims casually into walls, which is always a good thing. However, when he resorts to his weapons, the effect of seeing KANE kill is much lessened. I got some fun out of Kane's eye fetish and collection methods, and the flashback sequences - while not starring Kane - are pretty entertaining even though no one would claim that they were written with psychological insight.

See No Evil is the kind of DVD that you'd put on one night when you invite your friends over to watch Wrestlemania 35 and need something to watch before the show starts. It may not be as well-produced as movies of The Rock, but it is just as enjoyable. Worth renting for the entertainment and novelty value, and worth a buy if you're into collecting DVDs starring your favourite WWE superstars.

First published at incinemas on 2 March 2007

Accepted (DVD) (2006)

Ah, the weird initiation rites of college

The campus comedy genre has by now just completed one full cycle of creativity, stagnation, and rejuvenation - the last phase famously ushered in by movies like Road Trip and Old School, while the entire Revenge of the Nerds saga chronicled the earlier rise and fall of the same genre from 1984 to 1994. The genre is quite straightforward: pre-rejuvenation of the genre, the losers, slackers, and other assorted underachievers enter college and proceed to gain self-worth while fending off humiliation and rejection from the jocks and the conservative members of the faculty (Revenge of the Nerds). Post-rejuvenation, the losers, slackers and other assorted underachievers recreate their experiences of humililation and tribulation from the distance of time - either retelling and embellishing the tale (Road Trip), or through reliving it in a reenactment (Old School).

It is a strange thing that coming at what we would consider the rejuvenation phase of the genre, Accepted basically takes the familiar elements of both periods of the campus comedy and meshes them together, producing an even more familiar cinematic offering that one would imagine possible if its writers had stuck to just filling in the template of either period. It is stranger still that Accepted does have a somewhat original (albeit Old School-ish) premise that you'd never expect to descend softly and gently into familiar ground after a mere half hour in the film.

But for your cerebral entertainment, here's the most original thing about Accepted: smart aleck goof-off Bartleby (Justin Long, the guy who plays the Mac in Apple's Get a Mac commercials) and his 2 buddies discover after graduating from high school that no college (or "university", for us folks in the UK and the Commonwealth) would accept them. Hence, the need to set up a fake university (or college), complete with website, application forms with authentic-looking mastheads, and an entire campus to fool their parents into thinking they has been accepted. Presumably the amount of work that goes into the deception far outweighs the social shame of not attending college. Of course, when you set up a deception on such a comprehensive scale, it's impossible to keep it secret, and pretty soon 300 fellow rejectees from other colleges turn up at the front door of the South Hampton Institute of Technology (I kid you not about the name or the initials of the college!) demanding entrance. And because this is a college comedy, the prospect of empowering rejects and losers (as well as heading his own college) prompts Bartleby to operate the college as if it is the real deal.

It's suprising then that the scriptwriters fail to make an iconic film out of this intriguing mixture of overfamiliar tropes and occasional creative ideas. Perhaps the talent of comedian Lewis Black (from the Daily Show fame) is squandered in his thin role as the candid (i.e. frothing at the mouth) and radical former academic who Bartleby and friends rope in as the Dean of the school. The scriptwriters also miss the boat at a chance for a stronger and pungent satire of the education system. Instead, much of the comedy derives from the over-familiar tropes of teenagers slacking off in style in their own college, an obligatory love interest with a barely-formed subplot, the students' rivalry with the uptight frat boys from the legitimate and prestigious college across the road that culminates in what else but a phoney court battle. The lack of research that would have gone into making Accepted a great film shows easily: apparently Adam Cooper and Bill Collage are unaware of the Nordic folk high schools that basically operate like Bartleby's radical and hippy "make your own course, teach your own peers" educational programme.

As a comedy, Accepted is entertaining but not great. One would've wanted more of Lewis Black than Justin Long, who one wishes had better luck choosing his first leading comic role. On the whole, though, Accepted is certainly worth the rental and the easy laughs it generates.

First published at incinemas on 1 February 2007

The Ten Commandments (DVD) (2006)

Val Kilmer is Moses again

The success of Prince of Egypt should prepare audiences for the eventuality of spinoffs like musicals, musicals on ice, live action dramas, and an animated series. What brings a ray of hope to our future is a spinoff starring Val Kilmer, who provided the superb voice acting for Moses in the 1998 animation, and this hope is brought to us in the form of a stage musical called The Ten Commandments. What you will be watching on this DVD is a filmed version of a stage performance at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.

It’s a huge undertaking and a very courageous move – the story of Exodus is suited for a film extravaganza that only a Cecille DeMille or a Dreamworks can provide. Can the special effects-heavy premise of Exodus be easily and convincingly portrayed on stage? Then, can a stage performance really be framed and filmed by a video camera and not lose its physical dynamism?

It could boil down to the execution of set pieces, like the pyramids. the 10 plagues. the Golden Calf, the parting of the Red Sea, and the burning bush episodes. There is something sorely lacking when not all 10 plagues are featured, and that those that appear in this musical are shown on a screen projector at the back of the stage. And then you are seriously underwhelmed by the most comical animated frogs to jump out of the Nile. Would you be awed by the parting of the Red Sea, if it looked like two blocks of acrylic? Would you be awed if the burning bush were more of a bronze potted plant with tiny flames spouting from specially-designed recesses at the tip of its artificial leaves? All this may have looked splendid on stage, for all I know, but on screen, it feels like a long series of misses – the singular success being when I uttered aloud, “Now how did the Israelites manage to smelt all that gold and build that enormous calf statue in the desert?” That is the sense of awe I’m talking about, the one that this musical film fails to generate most of the time.

Perhaps then, the key to The Ten Commandments: The Musical lies in the choreography and the music? The huge cast do exude an undeniable sense of energy and conviction in their powerful performance, so much that Val Kilmer, a movie actor, seemed overwhelmed by the size of the ensemble nimbly dancing and singing before him. Then again, with a huge paunch and good 15-20 years over his co-star Kevin Earley, he must have been so uncomfortable with playing frat brother to the regent Ramses in the beginning of the show that he never quite recovered from the trauma.

There is no dialogue as the entire story is told entirely through song. The music, you must be warned, is strictly contemporary rock opera. It’s the type of music you’d expect to find at a service in a local megachurch – you’ll either love it or hate it with a passion. I can’t recall any hummable tunes right now, just half a day after watching the DVD.

The Ten Commandments has to be the first to have a DVD release in the same year as its first stage production – usually it takes 5 to 10 seasons before a popular musical like Les Miserable or Phantom of the Opera ever gets filmed. The Ten Commandments does not deliver what is expected of a stage musical, although it may appeal to those amongst us who just have to watch any biblical story as a rock musical. For better music, rent Prince of Egypt. For more majestic sets, rent either Prince of Egypt or the Cecille DeMille Ten Commandments.

First published at incinemas on 14 October 2006

Ultraviolet (DVD) (2006)

"My name is Milla Jojovich, and I star in a movie which you may not understand", is how Ultraviolet should have begun. The movie’s heroine kicks ass in skimpy leather costumes, while being infected with an exotic mutant virus, battling shadowy organisations, and collaborating with rebel terrorists to bring down corrupt governments. No wonder we can’t understand the movie, but that’s fine anyway.

Kurt Wimmer's follow-up to cult favourite Equilibrium is a movie that takes the high concept route by posing as an adaptation of a non-existent comic book. He takes the conceit to its extreme, imitating the over-the-top dialogue, the overdramatic facial expressions, and overconvoluted, preposterous plot elements of your average pulp comic book. If you can’t understand the movie, it’s because he meant it that way!

What you can understand and appreciate is the incredible eye candy of Milla Jojovich and the action scenes she appears in. Well choreographed, the fights look very beautiful but are bloodless and lack logic. It's like the rest of the movie, in other words.

Read the original Ultraviolet review here

DVD Review

You wish Milla Jojovich begins her commentary with “My name is Milla Jojovich, and I star in a movie you may not understand”, but “Hi~ My name is Milla Jojovich ~” is quite cute as well. And that’s as good as it gets, because Ms Jojovich, despite her stunning looks, isn’t really suited for solo commentary tasks on DVDs. Paired with a director and a producer (such as on Aeon Flux), she can be entertaining and dizzyingly fun but alone, the actress is reduced to a succession of “Wheee” and “this scene was fun to do” when the action sequences begin, and silence when they end. Absolute silence. At times, I had to doublecheck that I was watching the DVD with the commentary track enabled.

Why is poor Ms Jojovich doing solo commentary work, you may ask. Production of Ultraviolet was marred by the fact that Sony Pictures had a minor loss of confidence in director Kurt Wimmer during post-production, and edited and finished the movie themselves, without further input from Wimmer. The director was apparently not invited for the production of the special features and interviews.

What special features, you may ask. The unrated edition (only available in Region 1) has a 30-minute making of documentary which comes with interviews from the producers and special effects designers, who try but fail to explain the movie well because they are not the director.

Reportedly 30 minutes of footage was excised from the movie. About 7 minutes have been restored by Sony for the unrated version, but we are unlikely to see the rest of the missing footage until Sony and Wimmer make up and release a director’s cut.

First published at incinemas on 9 September 2006

Capote (DVD) (2006)

The year is 1959. Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is an up-and-coming author of popular short stories and captivating conversationalist who rubs shoulders with celebrities, fellow authors, critics and tycoons from New York society and beyond. On 15 November, he chances upon an article in the newspaper: four members of a family in Kansas were brutally murdered. Like Gustav Flaubert reading of a tragic suicide in the papers, Capote smells an opportunity to write something ground-breaking and important. Capote persuades William Shawn, his editor (Bob Balaban) at the New Yorker magazine, to fund a trip to Kansas to research for an article on the murders.

Within 6 years, the murderers will be executed, Capote will publish In Cold Blood, a bestseller that would turn him into a household name. Yet shortly after, Capote would become a withdrawn recluse and slide into alcoholism, never to complete another work. Did Truman Capote profit from the killers, their trial and execution? Did he manipulate, then betray the real-life subjects for his "non-fiction novel"? Was this what haunted the author for the rest of his life?

This film provides no easy answers, and virtually every character is in a hell of their own devising, facing dilemmas of their own construction.

Read original film review here

DVD Visuals

Somewhat disappointing is the presence of frequent black dirt and white lines from the film print that got transferred to the DVD without any cleanup. While not earthshakingly bad, these occur somewhat frequently, and in the same areas of the screen.

The very muted and washed out palette that cinematographer Adam Kimmel uses is reproduced faithfully, although it feels to me that projecting it on a cloth screen in a cinema produces a cleaner and less washed out colour tone than watching it on a television screen at home.

Extras

Answered Prayers

Capote is an award winning film, and everyone involved in the features are thankfully free of the compulsive need to play up the importance, artistic value or cleverness of the movie, unlike the DVD features of other less acclaimed movies. What you get is a no-nonsense, fluff-free, dispassionate look at the historical figure of Truman Capote, his novel In Cold Blood, and his long correspondence with the real-life killers. Interviews with his biographers and contemporaries flesh out the very flawed but very personable man, while a short video clip of the author should dispel criticisms that Hoffman merely did a mime job – the real Truman Capote lisped much more and spoke in an even higher pitched whine-drawl.

Making Capote

The filmmakers definitely put a lot of thought and preparation even before principal photography began for the movie. Their conceptualisation and extensive planning for the movie more than warrants the 45 minute documentary, which can be viewed in 2 sittings.

Commentaries

Best enabled after you have watched the film/DVD at least twice, as Hoffman, Miller and Kimmer reveal in detail how they constructed the film character of Capote, as well as the look and feel of each scene. These commentaries are worth the viewing, considering how much a work of art the film is.

Yours, Mine and Ours (DVD) (2005)

Needs more pratfalls!

A long time ago in 1968, there used to be a comedy called Yours, Mine and Ours. It was an average comedy about a strict navy widower with 10 kids meeting a flaky nurse widow with 8 kids, and marrying each other and their broods. Once the 2 unlikely parents and their families are brought together, everything else that unfolds should be quite predictable: comic scenes laced with mayhem as the very large blended family handles daily chores, shopping, meals, as well as getting into the territory of family squabbles between the children, the clash of parenting styles, and so on. What made a very predictable movie so memorable and worth watching was the presence of Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda as the leads.

Cue to 2006. There is a remake of Yours, Mine and Ours, starring Rene Russo and Dennis Quaid. Somehow their characters have been updated for the new millennium in predictable Hollywood fashion, receiving far more glamorous positions and jobs (Quaid plays a navy general and Russo is a fashion designer), swapping the number of kids, but nothing else has changed.

That’s not a flaw in itself, because despite the predictability of the movie, the comedy is likeable, inoffensive, and average family fare. Except there is no rubber-faced Lucille Ball to send the average fare to hysterical heights, no inspired scenes where parents get into really unexpected and wacky situations thanks to their children’s antics. Instead, you get to see Dennis Quaid slip and land his face into gooey, colourful liquid twice, Rene Russo deliver a pratfall once, and a huge pet pig run about the house every few minutes.

You’d expect the standards of comedy writing to increase over time, but what passes for slapstick seems to have deteriorated somewhat, so much so that the 1968 movie can now be accused of having clever and innovative comedy sequences.

So here’s the real problem with the movie: Hollywood has neither the acting talent, writing talent, nor directorial talent to top what was a run-of-the-mill filler comedy from the 1960s. Barely on par with the original, the 2006 remake can barely justify its existence. If you have to rent or watch an utterly inoffensive family comedy, why not just get the original?

Extras

A symptom of this degenerate age of filmmaking is the fact that both the director and his scriptwriters have absolutely no clue just how middling, average, close to forgettable, and just half an inch away from bad their film is. You’d either scream with horror or scream in delight as the director and his casting assistants go on and on about how "sparkly" and beautiful the 18 children are. There’s this bit about how Gosnell and the writers had wanted more pratfalls, visual jokes and mayhem in the movie, and were only stopped by the producers. That’s when you keel over in total shock over the fact that studio bureaucrats actually managed to prevent this film from being more banal than it already is.

First published at incinemas on 4 September 2006

Producers, The (DVD) (2005)

Support creativity: watch original versions, not remakes!

You wouldn’t be interested in this DVD if you hadn’t watched or heard of Mel Brooks’s original 1968 movie of the same name, starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder as the aging Broadway producer and the high-strung accountant who stumble upon a way to enrich themselves beyond their wildest imagination by producing the biggest and worst flop on Broadway. Part of the fun lie in their quest to locate the worst script, the worst director to helm the script, and the most inappropriate actors to cast in the musical. It’s the salad bowl combination of the sheer outrageousness of the scam, the over-the-top hysteria of Bialystock and Bloom, the genuinely likeable pairing of Mostel and Wilder, their daft sexbomb of a secretary, and their outré collaborator Roger DeBris and his airy crew, that made The Producers one of the funniest Mel Brooks movies ever.

What better way to pay tribute to the movie about a musical than to make a musical of the movie? Brooks and Thomas Meehan have done just that in their hit Broadway adaptation, which has proven to be just as funny and even more of a spectacle than the original. And what better way to pay tribute to that musical than to make… a musical movie? After all, if the original had a funny setup and hilarious lines, all its adaptations and their subsequent spinoffs should be as funny, right?

There’s a flaw with this reasoning, though. The Producers musical in 2003 was only good because it offered audiences something more than a staged version of the original movie. It had much more singing and dancing than the movie, and a fantastic stage set. What the 2006 movie had to do was offer far more than the stage musical.

Yet from the beginning, this enterprise was doomed with a miscalculation by Mel Brooks, in hiring Susan Stroman, the choreographer and director of the stage musical, to direct the movie. The result is a filmed version of the stage musical: it is as though Stroman built a slightly bigger set and planted a camera dead centre of where the front row seats would be if this were a playhouse, and just set the contraption rolling, occasionally adjusting the zoom and panning the camera. It is as though Stroman forgot to remind Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick that they are on camera, and the audience can see them very clearly even in the back row of the cinema (hell, they’re gigantic on a cinema screen!) and they don’t have to do the theatrical overacting anymore.

The result? A movie where the 2 stars are even more over-the-top than the Mostel and Wilder, except Lane and Broderick come across as pantomimes and Mostel and Wilder look comparatively realistic in their deliveries. A movie where the best scene is a fantasy sequence ("I want to be a producer"), because it required some measure of creativity in set design and visuals, and was a decent piece of cinematography.

When you compare The Producers to Chicago, Moulin Rouge, or last year’s U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha, it becomes clear where this musical movie fails where others have successfully made the leap from stage to film. The directors of these 3 films offer something that the stage musical cannot – angles, shots, scenes that would be impossible to film on a stage set. In other words, they made a cinematic film, and not a filmed musical. As films, there is no duplication and hence redundance between dialogue and music. Since Stroman did very little rewriting in the movie remake, almost every scene in The Producers feels like 2 minutes of dialogue followed by a 5 minute song making exactly the same points as the dialogue.

If not for the entertaining performances by Uma Thurman and Will Ferrell, The Producers would be a decent but somewhat flat and possibly overlong movie that doesn’t do the original proper service.

Extras

The must watch is the Deleted Scenes extra feature. None of these scenes were botched NGs. They might have been cut from the final print due to time constraints of the movie, but most of these scenes are non-redundant parts of the movie, and some feature songs that were the hallmark of the stage musical itself. What I cannot fathom is why a few of these deleted scenes appear to be much more dynamic in cinematography than the actual film itself.

First published at incinemas on 4 September 2006

Birthday Girl (DVD) (2001)

Her character can't speak English, looks cute, but is good with guns. Ergo, Nicole Kidman's in a role Milla Jojovich turned down.

Perhaps the Butterworth brothers should have left it to the French. After all, Birthday Girl does start out as a quirky French or French Canadian comedy.

In an absolutely boring town lived a bank teller who had an absurdly inflated job title and just celebrated a meaningless job promotion that granted him a key that opens one of the safes. He’s a sad geek of a man whose most comfortable interactions with other humans is through the glass panel at the bank. Understandably that will do no wonders for his love life (which consists of a few magazines), so he gets a mail order Russian bride from the internet. That’s what a sad sack our protagonist John is. You’d expect him to end up picking up a rather huge, hairy and bearded woman at the airport arrival lounge, but he ends up with Nicole Kidman, smoking like a chimney and speaking no word of English aside from "Yes...?"

There are only a few ways to develop the initial absurd situation, really. The oddball, introverted bank teller and the clueless immigrant eventually touch base using a Russian-English dictionary and some adult video tapes. That could develop into the sexy and quirky genre that the French and Spanish are adept at. Midway through the film, Nadia has a "Bad Day" (birthday) and some of her compatriots drop in to visit, possibly staying for the long term.

Somehow this quirky sex comedy turns into a black comedy, then morphs into a thriller (the compatriots force him to rob his own bank!), then a suspense thriller (more plot twists as it turns out not everyone is who they appear to be), and then an all-out adventure with Ben Chaplin as almost an action star. And so on.

The problem is for all its twists and turns, the Butterworths refuse to allow the plot to linger long enough to build up something solid. So while the furious genre switching can be appreciated in itself, this appreciation is lessened by the fact that the film isn’t a particularly good comedy, thriller, or adventure at all. There’s just no sustaining the feel or sensibilities of a new genre after one plot twist, because all the movie is gearing up to is the next plot twist and transition to another genre.

More disturbingly, Ben Chaplin’s nerd act does not evoke any emotions. Are we to pity him? But he isn’t really a humiliatingly sad case because the movie has moved on to its next twist before we could get to know him as a sad case. Is Nadia likeable? She certainly looks hot, but the helter skelter plot twists gives the filmmakers enough time to show much of her character in its various guises for us to get acquainted with and grow to like.

It hurts even more because when you think about it, the plot holes are everywhere in the movie. For instance, why does John find the guts to rob his own bank when Nadia is held as a hostage? Why does he not alert his colleagues, since the getaway car is a mile away from the bank? And why is it a mile away in the first place? Why, when John becomes a wanted fugitive, does he walk into hotels, eateries and airports without anyone noticing him? The immense stupidity of the plot holes make the plot twists even more unbelievable and weak.

While it is easy to get caught up with the fast-paced plot and reversals, your enjoyment of the film may take a slight hit if you begin to think about the film too deeply. Birthday Girl is still worth the rental, just make sure you’re not in a critical mood when watching this.

First published at incinemas on 22 August 2006

Supercross: The Movie (DVD) (2005)

What do you mean, I get 4 seconds of fame? Just FOUR?!

The brains and purse behind Supercross: The Movie are none other than Fox and Clear Channel Entertainment Motor Sports. Perhaps that’s why the main cast hail mostly from Fox television dramas. Or why Supercross is less of a sports movie than an 80 minute PR kit for the motor racing event known as Motorcross.

There are only 3 questions you should care about when watching a racing movie.

1.How is the racing choreography? How good-looking are the bikes?
2.Is the soundtrack something you can groove to?
3.How are the girls?

And any bonus would be a coherent plot (note I didn’t say believable plot), and whether this movie has any added depth or non-cringe inducing dialogue.

Unfortunately, Supercross fails on all counts. Steve Boyum has several credits to his name, notably as the stunt director for Buffy the Vampire series, but in this movie, he appears to be out of his depth. There is nothing inherently wrong with the sport of motor racing and the aerial stunts drivers frequently perform. There is something really wrong with Steve Boyum’s handling of the camera, which captures all the stunts and racers from a mid-shot. Where is the drama in that? Where is the danger? Where is the spectacle? The races looked terrifyingly dull and boring, and it must take special talent for Boyum to do that. What’s even more wrong with Steve Boyum is the final race sequence, where he finally discovers the close-up button on his camera, and the gritty, grainy film stock that he didn’t know what to do with earlier!

In the midst of the roaring motorcycles, there is surprisingly little soundtrack, and what was left of it couldn’t be heard over the roar of the motorcycles at times. That’s fine, because we gather that the fans of Motorcross don’t really listen to hip hop and are more of the rock music types. But for all the mean growling of the bikes, we still have to watch the ineptly-filmed sequences of the bike races and stunts, so what’s the point?

The girls occupy far too little screentime and look too familiar (they are after all your Fox television drama regulars) for anyone to care. And we should care about these girls – like why Sophia Bush does a remarkable disappearing act in the middle portion of the movie, and why Cameron Richardson keeps getting cut off when she takes off half of her blouse or all of her pants and only reappears at the end of the climactic race to cheer on the protagonist.

Can you tell that I seem to be avoiding any description of the movie’s plot? I apologise. Simply put, the best parts of Supercross: The Movie are its racing sequences. Once the characters start talking, you begin to lose the war with sleep – the dialogue is that corny. Plot angles that are heavily worked at are dropped for no reason whatsoever: the rich girl-poor boy romance between Sophia Bush and Steve Howie’s characters; the racetrack rivalry between Aaron Carter and Mike Vogel, who happens to be dating Carter’s onscreen sister; the mysterious death of the protagonists’ father, an indie, non-factory backed Motorcross minor legend.

Perhaps if the director had any sense of decency and honesty to the sport, he’d take out the dramatic plot and release the remaining badly-shot racing scenes as a fan movie. Real motor racing fans should watch Chow Yun Fat in All About Ah-long, a movie about the Macau Grand Prix.

First published at incinemas on 21 August 2006

River King, the (DVD) (2005)

This was almost the second coming of Twin Peaks. In midwinter, in a northern town, a body of a teenager is found. The image is striking: a young man with arms open, lying on his back, frozen solid in a river. It’s truly a sight to behold, and that’s why you rented this DVD. You think of flawed or eccentric investigators gradually unearthing deep and dark secrets of the townsfolk, as well as discovering the deceased wasn’t that innocent a victim. It helps that there’s a quirky mandolin score in the soundtrack, it raises our expectations of the Twin Peaks theme.

So. Abel Grey (Edward Burns) is our morose Canadian police investigator channelling the spirit of Duchovny, and is strangely convinced that the apparent suicide case could be more complex than it appears, and decides to poke around. The dead boy, Gus Pierce (Thomas Gibson), appears in flashbacks as an angsty genius outcast suffering – suffering! – in the local private boarding school and rejected membership by the elite fraternal society.

Apparently the investigation is hindered early on because the governors of the school make huge donations to the police force. Apparently the elite fraternal society might have something to hide about the boy’s death. And apparently, so did the girl he was having a close platonic relationship with, the same girl who is having a normal relationship with the fraternity’s leader and head prefect of the school.

Even before you know it, a promising whodunit has turned into a vehicle for... teenage angst and the evils of the private boarding school. What makes this standard mystery (which comes with its standard twists) somewhat less tolerable is how fast the movie glosses over the plot points, as if furiously ticking off some list hidden offscreen. There’s the love triangle between Abel, a female teacher, and her fiancé who happens to be the dean of the school. In both cases, you know there is something evil (TM) about the head boy and the dean, because they speak in really English public school accents, are cold and domineering. The dean is more evil because he invokes the harsh philosophy of the Spartans ("There must be no individuals!"), plays the cello (and hence is like a cultured Nazi officer), and hence probably knows what is happening.

Yet for all that these clichés are worth, and for all the time spent building up on the probable moral evil of the school and the people involved in Pierce’s murder or suicide, the horrifying thing is there is no real follow-through and no real payoff at the resolution of the movie. There is the side-plot of the apparitions of a small little boy wandering around during Abel’s investigations and what appears to be the ghost of Gus Pierce popping up in photographs. Both are resolved by the end of the movie, and both resolutions feel false.

If you liked the premise of this movie, I recommend you read the original book by Alice Hoffman. It appears that the film adaptation focused on all the wrong story arcs and themes from the book, and the screenwriter may have rewritten the original great ending.

First published at incinemas on 21 August 2006

Insomnia (DVD) (2002)

Seasonal affective disorder is particularly pronounced in the higher latitudes

A friend of mine told me once that noir is not a genre but a state of mind. I laughed at him for all of 5 seconds before realising that yes, you can forgo the realism (Sin City), the detective protagonist (A History of Violence), or even mirror the morally conflicted cop with a morally conflicted criminal (Infernal Affairs) and still end up with what undoubtedly feels like a noir film anyway.

The noir trend this decade is typified by directors who make an creative exercise of producing noir films by forgoing certain sacred cows of the genre, but the most radical move to date was made by Erik Skjoldbjærg, with his decision to relocate the detective story to a small town just inside the Arctic Circle, where there are 24 hours of daylight in summer. If you think on the meaning of the word noir, this is about the most sacred cow that can be slaughtered. In this 2002 US remake and adaptation of the Norwegian film of the same name, the original conceit is revisited, given depth and even broadened.

In this installment of Insomnia, Al Pacino plays LAPD detective Will Dormer, who is sent (or perhaps has pulled some strings to be sent) to a small town in Alaska to investigate a murder, together with his partner Hap Eckhart (Martin Donovan).

The local police department may feel this is a routine investigation that will no doubt be sped up by Dormer’s legendary skill, but the detective is also trying to get out of the heat of a departmental investigation. Apparently, like some noir heroes, Dormer is willing to bend a few rules in order to get the guilty the justice they deserve – or maybe not, but we aren’t sure, and neither does Eckhart, who decides to cooperate with the departmental investigation.

In the land of the midnight sun, what happens is the noir film becomes interiorised. Or as my friend put it, the essence of noir then becomes a state of mind that the director must impress upon the audience. What I liked is how Christopher Nolan does it by refocusing the film on the state of mind of Dormer, documenting the decline of his body and mind from insomnia (until one acclimatises to 24-hour daylight, it is somewhat difficult to sleep), guilt, and paranoia.

When the murderer turns up in an unexpected fashion in the half-way mark of the movie, another conceit is introduced: from a whodunit, Insomnia switches to a “why did he do it” mystery, and more importantly, the interaction between Dormer and his designated prey is complicated by the fact that the murderer is more than aware of the investigations in New York, and wants to simultaneously help and blackmail Dormer in return for his freedom.

Will the detective bend the rules yet one more time? Will he bend the rules instead to ensure the capture of the murderer? Nolan in his remake does some tweaking of the plot to ensure that Dormer is a shade more sympathetic to audiences, a move that actually brings the character to noir specifications of an amoral but conflicted protagonist. Also, the casting choice and direction of the murderer is an act of brilliance – no one expects Robin Williams is able to pull off a “normal to the point of banality” killer, which is more creepy than a demented killer type, and somewhat appropriate for this noir with many twists.

Whether it is for Nolan actually improves on the original, the acting of Al Pacino and Robin Williams, or the cat and mouse game between the two, Insomnia is worth the viewing and more than worth the DVD purchase.

First published at incinemas on 2 August 2006