Film Reviews by Kurtz

Yes, Christian Bale does damaged and dangerous again, but this offering doesn’t have an ounce of the dark humour (or diverting sex scenes) of “American Psycho”. Here, it’s all deadly serious, but after twenty minutes in the company of Bale’s character Jim and his adoring mate Mike, played by Freddy Rodriguez, you really start to weary of the constant fist-tapping and shouts of “Homeee!” None of this mateyness can conceal the fact that Bale’s Jim is a vicious bully and Mike is too spineless to make the break; even the long-suffering female characters do little to shake things up, obligingly tattooing themselves with their boyfriends’ names like primary school pencil cases and cooing such immortal feminist lines as “I would be happy to be killed by the man I love”. Most chilling is the fact that the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security offer Jim a job, claiming he’s “just what they are looking for”- sure, put a big gun in his hand and we can all sleep easier in our beds.

This was Luis Bunuel’s biggest commercial success, and it is still a highly regarded movie today- an eminent film historian provides the talk-track as one of the extras on the DVD. It is undeniably stylish and succeeds in creating a powerfully erotic atmosphere without actually revealing very much bare flesh- there are a few shots of Catherine Deneuve in her faintly scary sixties lingerie, but most of the frisson comes from the internal fantasy sequences where she imagines a life far removed the rather chaste and sterile world she inhabits with her husband. It was these sequences that Bunuel invented, grafting them on to material from the original novel to explain how Deneuve’s upper-middle class Severine ends up working in a brothel. Bunuel’s assistants tell in interviews how they did extensive research into female sexual fantasy (tough job, but someone’s got to do it!), but I’m unconvinced about how many women would actually get that hot under the bodice about being pelted with cow dung and whipped and ravished by randy coachmen. Maybe it was more a question of male fantasy, Sr. Bunuel? Throughout it all, though, Deneuve’s icy, mask-like impassivity reveals nothing either way.

“Night of the Sunflowers” is an absorbing drama about a shocking crime and the effect that it has on a tiny community in a disappearing rural Spain. It has a singular structure, following each of its characters in turn into the moral maze as they struggle to deal with the consequences of an attempted rape, and casting them adrift as they succumb to the temptations of revenge and corruption. This rather unnatural narrative device can be a little frustrating at times as we are introduced to character after character who we know to be destined for ultimate misery, but it’s well acted and the director has clearly stuck to his guns and resisted the temptation of a neat Hollywood-style finish.

There’s nothing like a good yarn to while away the hours, and the Aboriginal culture seems particularly rich in the tradition of storytelling. Filtered through a doubly distancing lens- a story within a story- and told largely in the Aboriginal language, “Ten Canoes” nonetheless catches the attention with mystery, magic, murder and forbidden love. A worthy film that is part entertainment, part defiant celebration of a culture under extreme threat.

“Brick Lane” is a fair attempt at bringing Monica Ali’s brilliant, sprawling novel to the screen; at its heart is the heroine’s efforts to make sense of her life as she is uprooted from rural Bangladesh and plonked into an arranged marriage to an older man in a grim East London tower block. In the novel, Ali is able to make use of numerous sub-plots to broaden the canvas, while the film concentrates almost exclusively on the marriage of Nazneem and her blowhard husband Chanu, which leaves us, like Nazneem, stuck in her flat most of the time watching the world go by. There are good performances all round in the film, but it only provides a hint of the delights that the novel offers.

This is an oddball thriller starring a young Owen Wilson as a serial killer who uses the minimum of force and prefers his victims to “simply go to sleep”. Straight away, then, the scares and tension linked with your standard serial killer movie are sacrificed, and you are left with more time to watch Wilson’s cheerful, considerate demeanour and ponder his motivation for these acts. You get plenty of the former as he charms his way around town, but very little insight into the latter as his hits get increasingly random (the stuff in the publicity material about “putting people out of their misery” simply doesn’t hold up) and his explanations ever vaguer.

“R-Point” is a standard “lost platoon” story with a mis-matched band of South Korean soldiers dispatched into the Vietnamese wilderness to track down a patrol of their compatriots who everyone believes to have been wiped out, but who appear able to send spooky radio messages to their base. These messages and occasional appearances from the ghost soldiers are the most effective features of the movie, but the director eventually settles for depicting the descent of the search party into madness and their own personal hell, and this involves a lot of goggling into the middle distance at unseen horrors, and unhinged reactions without satisfactory explanations, rather like the Sunday night TV series that has been entertaining and frustrating us for the last three years.

That’ll teach me to read the film academic’s “Screen Notes” in the DVD extras- apparently this is all about the pain of artistic creation and “the unrequited love between a lighthouse and a hole in the ground”…Funny, because I thought it was all about a horny writer, his rampant imagination and his uninhibited and agile lovers (who may or may not be all in his head)…Tremendous fun anyway. Not a clue what’s going on half the time, but just sit back and enjoy the rides(s)!!

Despite the rush you get from seeing indie kings Dandy Warhols make the big time before your very eyes in this film, it’s Anton Newcombe, frontman of Brian Jonestown Massacre, who represents the artistic heart of the movie. It is put together from seven years spent with the bands, filming them in performance, in conversation, in conflict and occasionally in trouble with the law. Newcombe produces heady sixties-inspired music and a mesmerising stage presence, but his talent has to battle against his self-destructive nature, be it in the form of drug abuse or his penchant for an on-stage punch-up (both unflinchingly shown here.) It’s immensely watchable and an awesome labour of love by director Timoner.

This was great fun- eighteen five minute tales by internationally acclaimed directors set in the self-proclaimed “City of Love,” all based in different areas of Paris and all dealing, sometimes ironically, sometimes reverentially, with the theme of love. There are dozens of famous actors to spot and Paris provides a wonderful range of backdrops, from the great to the grotty. Even if the odd segment drags a bit – the first one’s a bit of a non-event and the mimes left me cold- there’s always something fresh, funny and thought-provoking coming up next. My find of the year!

I liked this film although it was only partially successful in merging the two distinct storylines. Whilst the camera lingers predictably on the Winslet/Wilson affair, the more compelling story is that of the community's treatment of Jackie Earle Haley's sex offender, who is living with his doting mother having served his prison sentence.

Todd Solondz did a much more satisfying hatchet job on the lives and mores of the same middle-class America in "Happiness", and "Little Children", though entertaining enough in its own right, suffers by comparison with that work of genius as it purports to say the same things but ultimately lacks the courage of its convictions.

Early sighting of Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem both up to their shapely necks in lust and dirty dealing. Cruz gets to run around in the rain and be ardently wooed by most of the men in the cast (no change there, then), whilst the director leaves little to the imagination in his portrayal of Bardem as the local stud (nude bullfighting, anyone??) Bed-hopping, jealous rage, oedipal moments, a parrot voyeur and a suicidal piglet, you name it, it’s all there. There are a number of surreally comic moments, e.g. a fight to the death with a leg of ham, but we’re well into melodrama territory even before the OTT final tableau.

"Adapted from the play" always means cinematic death- the result is stagey dullness and a complete lack of that zest that real films have.This film is one up from that, but the fact that it's "Adapted from the short story" should ring alarm bells. And sure enough it spends much of its time wallowing in its literary traditions,(God, it's tough being a writer) and meticulously building atmoshere whilst neglecting to actually make anything happen on the screen.The usually effervescent Williams is virtually catatonic here, affecting a gravelly whisper to remind us that his character's a sensitive artist, and the central "mystery" is solved in 30 seconds by a secondary character. Oh, and did I mention NOTHING HAPPENS? Well, Williams does have to run away from security guard at one point, and Toni Collette gives him a couple of funny looks.(Probably the beard).

I found this quite enjoyable- Jamie Bell is in fine spiky form as the bereaved “hero” who is at war with the world after the death of his mother. His Hallam seems to carry the world on his shoulders, and his twisted posture and feisty attitude hint at his inner torment- quite a surprise, then, that he manages to pull off trysts with not one but two glamorous women (one admittedly a bit close to home!). Despite the unlikelihood of this, though, it’s a fresh and bracing addition to the anguished-teen-learning-about-life genre, and the rooftops of Edinburgh make a great setting for Hallam’s adventures.

Michel Gondry tries to bring dreams to the screen and he certainly nails the anything-goes visual world of our sleep; cuddly toys take flight, cityscapes of cellophane and corrugated cardboard rise and fall and the hero battles his squabbling co-workers with an outsize pair of hands.

His characters are far less arresting when they are awake, though. The central love story misfires and although Bernal brings his usual charm to the role, his character is such a big petulant kid that it's a relief when he decides to head back to Mexico. Charlotte Gainsbourg is equally irritating- and it's significant that despite his cack-handed wooing of her, it's her mate Emma de Caunes' number that Bernal really wants... and who can blame him?