[REC] - Review by Sandra Dupuy

Directors: Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza
Screenplay: Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza and Luis Berdejo
Running Time: 78 min
Certificate: 18
Out now

“[There are] corrupt perfumes, rich and triumphant – Possessing the expansiveness of infinite things – Like amber, musc, benzoin and incense…” Charles Baudelaire’s verses from "Correspondances"(Les Fleurs du Mal/ The Flowers of Evil, 1857) can be applied to Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s new masterful horror. REC starts slowly, in a sterile nightly environment, an eerie fire department in a small town somewhere in Spain, and develops into something first intangible, then unbearably monstrous. The best horror film of the year (along with The Orphanage) possesses the decadence of Baudelaire’s darkest poems, Edgar Poe’s morbid imaginings and H.P. Lovecraft’s nauseous world, its musty smell concealing decaying abominations.

While covering a tedious night shift at the station, brazen TV reporter Ángela (Manuela Velasco, Goya winner for Best Newcomer) and her cameraman follow the crew on a call to rescue an elderly woman incapable of escaping the inferno consuming her home. As they reach the building, the air is pierced by horrific screams, and the TV crew jump out of their flying van into the fire.

As in The Blair Witch Project, the hand-held camera is used by two people, a cameraman we barely see, and young and ambitious go-getter Angela. If it takes a good thirty minutes to adjust to the jittery pans, it is a half-hour well spent. Angela’s brisk walk through the station’s deserted corridors creates a feeling of boredom, infused with growing dread as the TV and fire crews step into the infected building. David Gallart’s award-winning editing, teamed with Pablo Rosso’s atmospheric cinematography, plunges the audience into a frantic nightmare that alternates adrenaline-fuelled zombie chases with excruciating pauses on still silhouettes staring from afar, their eyes black holes slowly absorbing the characters’ energy.

Gallart and Rosso’s solid work reflects Balaguero and Plaza’s clever use of the digital medium. The camera, eye of the beholder, is a witness, but also a voyeur and a predator, scrupulously recording every neck-biting incident, and tracking traumatised occupants up a winding stairway to Hell. The sole testimony of a potentially horrific situation which the authorities are desperately trying to nip in the bud, Angela’s report gets partly erased, rewound, watched and re-watched in an attempt to rationalize the supernatural and control the rampant hysteria which shakes the terrified inhabitants and nefarious building to their foundations.

From Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Days Later (2007) to George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead (2008), contemporary zombie movies are legion, but REC’s claustrophobic setting and intricate screenplay renew the genre. More than a simple fear engine, the film also provides an accurate psycho-social study of antagonistic characters cynically abandoned by a ruthless government, and ready to cheat, steal, and kill to save their skin. REC shares many themes and gory scenes - a confined hunting ground, a matricide, strong political under-currents, etc - with Romero’s iconic Night of the Living Dead (1968), and its shocking ending, coronary-inducing and thought-provoking, proves once again that beautifully crafted and creative Spanish horror is not a second-class contender to America and Japan’s guts and gore.

Guilty Pleasures of the Cinematic Kind

In this second instalment of the series "Guilty Pleasures", in which Montagers reveal their deepest, darkest cinematic favourites, Sandra Dupuy reveals her punchy pleasures of the guilty kind. Incidentally fact fans, Chuck Norris is so fast he can run around the world and punch himself in the back of the head. It’s true!

Behind all the bling, I’m a tomboy. While dedicated to promoting so-called “world cinema” (what does that term encompass anyway, all non-WASP cinema?), part of my heart still belongs to Bruce, Patrick, Jackie and a few blockbusting oddities. And all of this stems from my troubled past…

When I was eight, I developed a fetish for martial artists. While most of my girlfriends proudly displayed photos of David Hamilton and posters of the sugary 80s Japanese cartoon character Candy on their flowery walls, I had pinned, next to the aforementioned Manga icon, photos of Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon and Chuck Norris in whatever stinker he flexed his disproportioned pecs in at the time. Yeah, Chuck and Bruce’s pictures were feverishly torn from martial art magazines I spent my weekly pocket money on, because I secretly knew that one day I’d become the greatest female kung fu artist in the world.

Alas, that hasn’t happened yet, but while I may now tease my brother for having dared watch Walker, Texas Ranger, my admiration for Bruce Lee has never wavered. I regularly re-watch Fist of Fury, Way of the Dragon, and of course Enter the Dragon, his last movie, completed just before he sadly died of an alleged steroid-induced heart attack.

Enter the Dragon is my favourite because I first watched it when I was very young. I still laugh out loud at some everlasting lines. His fighting advice to a new Shaolin Temple recruit: “I said emotional content, not anger!” The hilarious conclusion to the training session: “It’s like a finger pointing to the moon. If you focus on the finger, you miss all the heavenly glory”. Or simply his deadpan address to evil Han (Shih Kien): “You have dishonoured my family, and you have dishonoured the Shaolin Temple”, after which he sets up to kick his nemesis’s sorry ass in the mesmerising mirror fight scene.



Everything about Enter the Dragon is both cheesy and awesome, from Lalo Schifrin’s cool 70s exploitation-type score to the hammy performances and bad dubbing (not a single line of dialogue is in sync). On top of that, Bruce’s charisma and incredible skills make the fight scenes astonishing. Some of his kicks, too quick for the camera, were tricky to shoot, but the result is just so rewarding... and enhanced by Lee’s extensive panoply of squeals, cries and grunts. Darts are flying, nunchakus hissing and fists are furious. A pure delight!

I know Tarantino started an exploitation-slash-manga-slash-martial-art-flick revival with Kill Bill, but my taste for kung-fu wasn’t that fashionable in the mid-80s, where everyone was obsessed with tacky dance films. Of course, I watched those too, but was never a big fan of Fame or Flashdance. I would have been very fussy, however, had I denied myself the never-ending source of pleasure Dirty Dancing and Patrick Swayze offered. He wasn’t as perfectly pretty as Rob Lowe, perfectly toothy as Tom Cruise, or perfectly sleazy as Mickey Rourke, but there was something about Patrick. His mullet was cooler than Don Johnson’s and his dance moves way steamier than Travolta’s. The only cloud in the picture was of course Baby (Jennifer Grey), of whom I was insanely jealous. Why on earth would the director pick such an ugly duckling that couldn’t even act, and barely dance (not as well as Patrick anyway)? I would have happily put Baby in the corner, and left her there!



Though I initially preferred Lowe to Swayze for plastic reasons, the latter obviously made better career moves. While Rob was desperately trying to become the American Alain Delon, he looked more braindead than enigmatic in forgettable teen comedies like About Last Night. Patrick, on the other hand, swiftly moved from dirty dancer with a mean quiff to dirty surfer with a mean streak. There might have been a slightly embarrassing Razzie Award for Road House in between, which I easily forgot, shedding buckets of tears during Ghost. Oh happy days, when Pat was a angel and Demi Moore a semi-virgin, untouched by plastic surgeons (and Ashton) …

If I initially took eager friends to see Katherine Bigelow’s Point Break in 1991, it was mostly for Keanu Reeves, but once again Patrick did it for me. And I became a Bigelow fan. Finally a female director who didn’t shy away from a kick-ass action romp with feelings! Yes, Johnny Utah (Keanu) and Bodhi (Patrick) are very sensitive fellas who get hammered, jump on surf boards in and out of the blue, parachute jump from planes, bone jump on sexy surf groupie Tyler (Lori Petty), wear super-cool Ex-Presidents masks, etc.

Because of that amazing blend of crazy stunts and intense emotions – how poignant is it when Bodhi disappears on his battered surfboard to tackle the ultimate monster wave Down Under? - Point Break became my second favourite action movie. I then watched a couple of Bigelow’s gems, Near Dark, a melancholy vampire story, and Strange Days, starring “Rafe” Fiennes and Juliette Lewis as a heroin addict rock chick (what a challenge!), and my love for Patrick was re-ignited with Donnie Darko… and spontaneously combusted when his character got busted for paedophilia. Thankfully, I had resorted to watching Jackie Chan movies by 1996, so Patrick’s terrifying turn was easier to bear.

Let’s forget about Bruce and Patrick for a moment, for Jackie Chan is another kettle of fists. He may not be as sexy as Swayze or as philosophical as Lee, but boy does he crack me up. I mean, who else would be nicknamed Pao Pao (Chinese for “Cannonball”) because he rolled around a lot as an infant? And he rocks as an adult, particularly in Rumble in the Bronx. I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t yet seen Drunken Master and Fearless Hyena, but I’m convinced that they can’t equal Chan’s adventures in the Big Apple, enthusiastically battling drug dealers here, happily saving a demure damsel there, solely armed with his infectious grin, silly jokes and iron biceps.

So Jackie’s cheeky giggles conclude my trilogy of guilty pleasures. I have more to say, but fear not (or fear a lot?), this will be the topic of my next feature entitled “The Dirty Way of the Dancing Dragon from the Bronx”. I’m not kidding.

FFF 2008: Bled Number One - review by Sandra Dupuy

Director: Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche
Screenplay : Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, Louise Thermes
Running time: 100 min
Certificate: 12

Released in 2006, Bled Number One justly gathered awards worldwide as well as the “Prix de la Jeunesse” (Youth Award) in the section “Un Certain Regard” (A Certain Outlook) at Cannes the same year. Algerian director Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s second film is an interesting example of how colonial past and metropolitan lifestyle mesh within French contemporary culture. With its documentary aspect, beautiful close-ups and abstract moments of pure “inner time”, Bled Number One is a tribute to early cinema and Algeria, though it doesn’t shy away from criticising the mother country.

An opening tracking shot through a winding alley-way, complete with Cheb Mami’s lament echoing against the white-washed houses, constitutes the start of a strange adventure. The film will leave the location and time indeterminate until the end. The disconcerting structure of Bled Number One shows daily life in the village of Loulouj, mid-way between mountains and sea. In the manner of a North-African Tsai-Min Liang, RAZ’s lingering camera focuses on people and details (gazes, boat wrecks or half-open shutters) rather than action, in long takes, sometimes to the point of discomfort.

Things are happening though. Bouzid (Abel Jafri), a local resident, organises a defence committee to fight roaming fundamentalist youths. Kamel “La France” (RAZ himself), back to Algeria after doing time in prison on the other side of the Mediterranean, wanders around places and people without any defined status. Bouzid’s sister Louisa (wonderful singer/ songwriter Meryem Serbah) can’t flee her abusive husband (famous stand-up comedian Ramzy Bedia) without getting beaten up by her brother in the process. She finally fulfils her forbidden passion for music and performs eerie blues songs in front of the real staff and patients of Constantine’s mental institution, in which she takes refuge after a suicide attempt.

Music plays a key part in the film, some scenes being built around contemplative moments where Kamel seeks solace in the bewitching hills surrounding the village, and listens to an anonymous guitar player’s hyper-saturated and psychedelic sounds. Rodolphe Burger, ex-singer and lead guitar of the 90s indie band Kat Onoma, brings his cult presence and electrifying compositions for a dreamy effect. Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s self-produced family enterprise (most of the village inhabitants are also his relatives) shows a divided Algeria fighting a new rise of fundamentalism while treating women as second-class citizens. Playfully misleading and constantly though-provoking, Bled Number One brings in a fresh outlook on the Franco-Algerian troubled rapport.

Families, Feuds and Fun: French Film Festival 2008

Glasgow francophones and cinephiles, get thee to the GFT. The French Film Festival is in town. Sandra Dupuy gives us the shakedown on the best of the fest.

The French Film Festival currently taking place all over the UK is coming to our Glasgow screens this afternoon. The 29 films shown at the GFT over two weeks have been split into three main categories, Preview for the forthcoming UK releases, Panorama for classics or works made by well-established directors, and Discovery for first features or successful follow-ups. Boldly starting with Bled Number One and Those Who Remain, the GFT selection’s (and the Festival’s) keynotes are indeed family, love and politics, the ultimate French combination.

The 2008 vintage tackles strong themes such as the Algerian War legacy in France, and politics in general, with the forthcoming 40^th anniversary of “Mai 68”. Bled Number One, Rabah Ameur-Zaimeche’s follow-up to his well regarded 2001 debut Wesh-Wesh (What’s Going On), is the latest in a flurry a French-produced movies dealing with Franco-Algerian cross-currents and questioning the place of a prominent Algerian culture in post-colonial, contemporary French society.

One of the most moving films of the selection is Summer of 62. The French title, Cartouches gauloises, is more polemic and refers both to the famed French cigarette brand and French bullets. Mehdi Charef’s 1987 debut Le thé au harem d’Archimède was a hit tackling the issue of France’s diverse and conflicting cultures. 20 years after, the autobiographical Cartouches gauloises brutally depicts the last days of French colonial occupation in Algeria through the eyes of 11 year old Ali (Hamada).

Two other films, Mon Colonel (directed by Laurent Herbiet and co-written by Costa-Gavras) and Florent-Emilio Siri’s Intimate Enemies are dedicated to the same theme. The first recalls how French soldiers used systematic torture on Algerian civilians and fellaga (freedom fighters) while the second focus on relationships within the French Army at that particular time.

A mini-section entitled Mai 68 Retro gives the opportunity to watch or re-watch Louis Malle’s 1989 classic Milou en mai/ May Fools, centred around a family gathering for their matriarch’s funeral, as well as Mai 68, a rare documentary filmed by Jean-Luc Magneron during the eponymous riots. Other political films are on offer, like Serge Bozon’s unexpected musical war drama La France, beloved actor and FFF guest Jean-Pierre Darroussin’s first directed feature The Premonition or Claude Miller’s highly prized and praised A Secret.

The family and its complex mechanics are also featured, with the Doillon clan strongly present. Boxes, Jane Birkin’s long-awaited directorial debut, is an autobiographical drama in which a menopausal woman, having recently moved to Brittany, leafs through boxes, unleashing ghosts from the past. Veteran director Jacques Doillon’s ex-partner’s theatrical meditation also stars their daughter Lou Doillon.

Lou’s half-sister Lola Doillon hasn’t been outdone, as she will present her first feature Just About Love at the GFT on the 8^th of March at 8.30pm, and will stay for a Q&A session. Her comedy offers a fresh outlook on love, youth and first experiences, well summed up by the French title “Et toi, t’es sur qui?” (literally “What about you, who are you on?”).

Still within the family theme, Hunting and Gathering, a charming comedy drama, celebrates veteran Claude Berri’s return after his 2005 L’un reste, l’autre part, which starred Charlotte Gainsbourg and Daniel Auteuil. Berri has once again gathered an impressive cast ranging from France’s brightest young actors Audrey Tautou and Guillaume Canet to “grandes dames” Danièle Lebrun and Françoise Bertin. Berri’s film has won critical acclaim while being a French box-office success. At the opposite end of the family spectrum is Don’t Worry, I’m Fine, director/actor Philippe Lioret’s intimist drama about a 19 year old girl (amazing newcomer Melanie Laurent) searching for her twin brother.

Let’s not forget Conversation With My Gardener, Jean Becker’s new venture. The veteran and FFF guest is better known in the UK for his riveting psycho-thriller L’Eté Meurtrier/ One Deadly Summer (featuring undisputed 1984 César winner Isabelle Adjani) and his Vanessa Paradis/ Gérard Depardieu drama Elisa (1995). In Conversation…, leads Daniel Auteuil and Jean-Pierre Darroussin form an amazing and moving duo at the heart of this bittersweet comedy drama.

Last but not least, a few well-chosen comedies brighten up the selection. Priceless, which premiered at the recent Glasgow Film Festival, is a definite crowd-pleaser, as well as an astute and sarcastic comedy depicting a superficial and wealthy world in which everyone’s for sale. Gad Elmaleh and Audrey Tautou’s unlikely association works well and the two glamorous stars are reminiscent of Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in their comedy hey days.

The wonderful Sandrine Bonnaire, whose directorial debut, Her Name is Sabine, is also screened in London for the FFF, reveals her unsuspected comic talent to Vincent Lindon in Pierre Jolivet’s romcom Could This Be Love. And if, unlike one of my revered colleagues, you haven’t had enough of 2008 BAFTA, Oscar and César winner Marion Cotillard, she’s back in Fair Play, directed by FFF guest Lionel Bailliu and also starring heartthrob Benoit Magimel.

All in all the 2008 French Film Festival selection, despite its common themes, is ambitious, challenging and extremely varied. Don’t forget to check out previews of The Story of Richard O, Priceless and Second Wind, as well as reviews of Boxes, La France, In Your Wake, Poison Friends and Before I Forget. Happy Festival! Sport your best beret, grab a glass of wine, and enjoy!

For more details on the FFF 2008, go to

http://www.gft.org.uk/

http://www.frenchfilmfestival.org.uk/

GFF - To Each Her Own Cinema

To celebrate Cannes 60th birthday, the festival has commissioned a cavalcade of world class directors to create their own homage to the enigmatic art form of cinema itself. But don't think To Each His Own Cinema is all sobbing into light projected memories, although some of it is exactly that. There is also a cynical and ironic response to the 'moving' image. Sandra Dupuy and Emma Lennox pick out some of the 33 strong shorts to explore this love/ hate relationship in what is surely cinema's finest naval gazing.

Sandra’s selection:

For Gilles Jacob, Cannes’ life-long director, the mammoth festival’s 60 candles had to be blown in a different direction this time. No complacency, no gushing tribute, and if possible, no overwhelming nostalgia. The main rules were that To Each His Own Cinema had to be a compilation of 3 minute long segments. Jacob and his team gathered 33 directors from all five continents and from 25 different countries. The general assignment was to translate “their current state of mind as inspired by the motion picture theatre.” No director was to know of the other fragments and synopses from colleagues, and they all accepted to discover the film at the same time as festival-goers and the general public, who were able to watch it thanks to an evening replay on French TV.

As Jacob points out, these shorts are made by drastically different individuals expressing varied aesthetic orientations and thematic preoccupations. The 33 directors are visual poets who capture a parcel of the world and transcend it into an art, cinema, “which under our very eyes creates its own history”. It’s amazing to witness the freshness, pretension-free audacity and accessibility of these sketches, which so skilfully translate the melting-pot aspect of their cultures, origins and talent into 3 minute wonders.

One of the main questions the film raises is whether art imitates reality and whether nature necessarily prevails over nurture. The most extreme example of this occasionally uneasy cohabitation is Amos Gitai’s Le Dibbouk de Haifa. A mixed crowd of Israelis and Palestinians is enjoying a movie until a bomb is dropped on the cinema and the roof collapses, killing and injuring people from both sides. For highly political Israeli Gitai, art for the sake of it can only be enjoyed up to the point where it dissolves behind life’s grim reality. And can one even be bothered thinking about films when he or she confronts daily life-threatening situations?

Cronenberg’s short is politically charged, but also ferociously ironic, as he films himself At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World. The sequence shows him grimacing and trying to position his gun in the best (and often ridiculous) possible ways to commit suicide. Cronenberg’s hilarious performance would on its own have an impact, which is here enhanced by the mock commentary delivered all the way through by unseen and abject Fox-type TV presenters seeking the ultimate juicy drama, like the media vultures they are. The ending sentence “Don’t worry, we will keep you informed all the way to the end” cynically resonates, bringing echoes of past news reports where journalists, seemingly unable to help victims materially, revelled nevertheless on documenting slow and painful deaths.

Finnish cult director Aki Kaurismaki treats us to his unique blend of dry humour and mock socialism, setting his screening in a metal factory (La Fonderie/ The Foundry) and using fetish actor Matti Pellonpää, former Leningrad Cowboy, in a typical low-key, silent and comical performance. Roman Polanski’s Cinéma Erotique, in a completely different register, turns upside down the porn-cinema cliché of the masturbating loner, adding to the scarce showroom audience a middle-aged couple, who gets more and more “inconvenienced” by increasingly loud grunts from their back-row co-viewer. As for Nanni Moretti, he distillates in Diario di uno spettattore his inimitable mix of self-deprecating humour and shameless cinephilia.

All of these, along with Takeshi Kitano, Chen Kaige, Tsai Min Liang, Jane Campion and Lars Von Trier, manage to send an uplifting love message to cinema, and to their audience, while keeping their feet solidly on reality’s ground. All shorts are not equally entertaining, some even feel incredibly pompous or boring or both (I’m thinking of Michael Cimino’s segment, as well as those of Youssef Chahine, Gus Van Sant or Wong Kar-Wai), but the main reproach that can be done is that the film doesn’t including more female directors such as French veteran Claire Denis or young Iranian prodigy Samira Makmalbaf, daughter of the great Mohsen Makmalbaf, one of Iran’s leading directors alongside Abbas Kiarostami. Whether this is due to unavailability or negligence I don’t know, but it reminds us once again how male-centred the industry still is.

Emma’s selection:

The problems of cinema come from issues of power and responsibility, in particular as cultural propaganda for Western ideology. Though the wide array of world directors is able to show global perspectives, it often describes the 'idea' of cinema as nostalgic and American. Children in rural China watch Charlie Chaplin, there are Westerns in Africa, and some Indian teenagers are treated to fashions and styles far removed from their own. There is a melancholy tone to some descriptions of viewings about the fact that this social medium hasn't been used to mythologize their own culture and stories.

The Coen brothers turn this on its head in their clever character led film, World Cinema. An ignorant cowboy, Josh Brolin, tries to pick which classic of world cinema to watch (either Rules of the Game, or Climates) and is suitably moved by the experience, or is it the sales clerk?

But more strongly put is the opposite case, and here are examples in which the directors seem to be saying it's life which is beautiful.

Takeshi Kitano's One Fine Day depicts a failed cinema going experience in which a farmer can’t manage to watch Kitano's Kids’ Return. With little dialogue, the film is a humorous farce cleverly interweaving moments of Kids’ Return as a punchline. Disgruntled, the farmer leaves the cinema to walk home through a beautiful vista of setting sun and mountains, into the eponymous 'fine day'.

Ken Loach- Happy Ending
In the face of increasingly ridiculous and schlock blockbusters, a father and son decide instead to go the football. It's simple, satirical and charming, and who's going to criticise Ken Loach for a happy ending?

Walter Salles- A 8944km de Cannes
Without stepping foot inside a cinema, two Brazilian musicians, Castanha and Caju, do a 3 min freestyle in honour of the Cannes Festival. The talent on display rather enforces music as the world's most potent and entertaining medium, and as they wander off screen Castanha admits that he's never been to Cannes, he just learned about it on the internet.

Wim Wenders' War in Peace is out of the serious shorts the most successful political statement made. It documents an actual screening of Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down to a village in the Katanga region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The grim faces of the adults and children, shot in infrared of the dark screening are contrasted by events outside the make shift cinema, where music and community fill the surroundings. The Western imperialism is emphasised in the juxtaposition of the real victims of war against the racially problematic and biased American entertainment film.

Whatever your perspective on cinema is, one thing that all cinephiles can agree on is the premise for Lars Von Trier's short Occupations. As shockingly violent as it is hilarious, the point is made clear: if there is anyone you should truly hate, it's the film critic.

GFF review: Shotgun Stories, by Sandra Dupuy

Director: Jeff Nichols
Screenplay: Jeff Nichols
Running time: 90 min
Certificate: 18
Screening: 20th and 21st of February at the GFT; on general release from the 11th of April

Shotgun Stories is sharp as a knife and languid as a sunny afternoon stroll in the town of England, Arkansas. In his first feature, director, writer and producer Jeff Nichols engineers a feud between two sets of half brothers whose father has just died. Son (Michael Shannon), Boy (Douglas Ligon) and Kid Hayes (Barlow Jacobs) are the unlucky first brood of “a man who made [their] life hell and left [them] to be raised by a hateful woman”, says the elder in an impromptu and unwelcome speech at the old man’s funeral, where his second wife and her four sons are present. The incident will soon assume the accents of a Greek tragedy, escalating into ineluctable hate, desperation and death.

Nichols, in a harrowing succession of short and potent scenes, depicts life in the cotton fields and back roads of poor rural Arkansas, filming derelict landscapes and abandoned silos on the fringes of town, where stray dogs roam for scraps of food and miserable souls give in to hopelessness out of sheer lassitude. The disenchanted characters of Shotgun Stories possess the quiet resignation of Cormac McCarthy’s lowlifes and the simmering anger so powerfully orchestrated by Tennessee Williams. Son, Boy and Kid, the three unnamed and unwanted brothers, cannot keep up with a dreamless life of wandering until the fundamental wrong, the primeval abandon, has been righted.

The director’s elliptic style is well complemented by Adam Stone’s striking cinematography. A natural golden and powdery daylight contrasts deep blue skies with yellow fields and brown dirt tracks through which the characters, wrapped in tense silence, drag grief and grudges for eternity. Looks are essential tools of cinema language, and the exchange of gazes between brothers, husbands and wives or parents and sons reveal much more than all the histrionics in the world.

Never melodramatic or self-indulgent, Nichols' script leaves space for a documentary-like approach to performance and violence. Simultaneously infused with the festering fury of Elia Kazan’s East of Eden (1955) and the harsh poetry of Terence Malick’s meandering Badlands (1973), Shotgun Stories calls for compelling and compulsory viewing.

GFF- Far North - by Sandra Dupuy

Director: Asif Kapadia
Screenplay: Asif Kapadia and Tim Miller, from a short story by Sarah Maitland
Running time: 89 min
Certificate: 15
Screening: 18th and 19th of February, GFT

With a fluid tracking shot over desolate Arctic landscapes where frozen seas neighbour inaccessible glaciers, you’re immediately immersed in the chilling depths of Asif Kapadia’s second film. Like his BAFTA winning feature The Warrior (2001), Far North’s epic and contemplative feel as well as its barren plot admirably serve the intricate character study at work.

The icy tundra is the ideal casket for a village witch to cast a spell on young and innocent Saiva (Michelle Yeoh). Far North’s tale of malevolence opens with Yeoh’s haunting face and bewitching voice reminiscing about past events slowly brought to the surface via brutal flashbacks. The present finds her sharing a yurt in the middle of nowhere with younger Anja (Michelle Krusiek). Their seemingly peaceful pace is turned upside down when Saiva finds a man (Sean Bean) at death’s door on the nearby ice floe.

Kapadia’s camera slowly lingers on the characters’ windswept faces and the disquieting landscapes, involuntary witnesses of past wrongs and insanity in progress. Krusiek’s subtle performance as Saiva’s fresh and naïve companion efficiently contrasts with Yeoh’s, as fascinating as ever. The Hong-Kong legend empowers her grieving character with enough dignity and mystery to carry the film through to its creepy ending. Even Sean Bean who plays Loki, a wounded 21st century Beowulf, gets away with minimal acting thanks to his abundant scars and pained grimaces.

Fire smoulders under the ice, as it did in Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat (2001), though the shamanism dimension isn’t as prevalent. Yeoh’s take on the avenging angel (her character presents similarities with Asami from Takashi Miike’s 1999 Audition) as well as Kapadia’s stunning adaptation will definitely hoist Far North into the pantheon of taut thrillers behind closed doors.

GFF review: Lonesome Jim - by Sandra Dupuy

Director: Steve Buscemi

Screenplay: James C. Strouse

Running time: 91 min

Certificate: 15

Screenings: 15th and 16th of February, GFT.

A pale landscape roughened by the faded grainy browns and greys of an Indiana winter slowly unfolds on the big screen. A slender silhouette staggers from the bus and the camera quickly closes on Casey Affleck’s melancholy face. Lonesome Jim’s back in town, dragging his despair and grudging humanity with him.

The self-confessed chronically depressed 27 year old, unable to make it as a part-time dog walker in Manhattan, reluctantly returns to his parents’ home-sweet-home in small town Indiana, sharing their unrequited affection with his older brother, a would-be CIA agent turned volunteer baseball coach, father of two and all round loser. Ensues a dry, bittersweet slice of life with old family dysfunctions festering under a smiley surface and a rocky romance punctuated with infectious laughter.

Rising star Affleck’s stunning performance and strong support from co-stars Liv Tyler (nurse and single Mom Anika), Mary Kay Place (Jim’s mother), Seymour Cassel (Jim’s father), Buscemi’s old pal Mark Boone Junior (Jim’s Uncle Evil) and child sensation Jack Rovello (Anika’s son Benjamin) provide endearing entertainment under the teasing and benevolent gaze of actor/director Steve Buscemi. A consummate performer himself, he lends the film his troubled philanthropy and quirky outlook on life. It has taken him five years to concoct another masterpiece in a minor key for the big screen, after the dark and gritty Animal Factory (2000), but his new directing adventure is well worth the wait. If the Montage team had to devise an award for the GFF’s best independent picture, Lonesome Jim would be your humble reviewer’s first choice.

Shane Meadows' England

Fresh from his Best British Film BAFTA for This is England, Shane Meadows is on a career high. Sandra Dupuy examines the life and work of this gritty, socio-political director.

His interviewers evoke his formidable appearance: bald headed, sporting an inquisitive and mocking gaze and equipped with a sturdy scrum half physique. His detractors belittle his systematic use of Nottingham suburbs and the Midlands as a backdrop set for his films, and the lad culture they depict.

But the true connoisseurs appreciate the importance of Shane Meadows’ work. What singles him out from his peers and makes him one of Britain’s most intriguing film stylists is his unwavering observation of seemingly ordinary people, coupled with his ability to empower his films with a raw and uplifting energy, flowing from disaster to delight and drollery to dread.

Meadows questions the foundations of the English identity at a crucial contemporary period, the 80s, through his own experience as a rowdy youngster growing up in the suburbs of Uttoxeter. Though only loosely autobiographic, This is England (2006) is an accurate reconstruction of the political instability of a country oscillating between Conservative and Labour leadership before landing in Margaret Thatcher’s powerful hands. The opening credits’ feature a collage of 80s television news which skilfully illustrate the social and political preoccupations of the time. All the ills afflicting British society throughout the late seventies and early eighties are there - the strikes, the high unemployment, the inner city racial riots, the Falklands War and the class struggle born of an inadequacy between a mostly working class population and its impotent monarchs.

The director’s other films are not as politically charged, but they tackle themes that are intrinsically English and resolutely contemporary. The settings of Meadows’ stories borrow from Ken Loach’s realism. A Room for Romeo Brass (1999) opens in a Kes-like manner, with its two main protagonists, Romeo Brass (Andrew Shim) and Gavin “Knocks” Wolley (Ben Marshall) discussing family feuds under a delicately chiselled tree, with a typical misty green Northern countryside in the background. As soon as the title appears and The Specials’ “A Message to You Rudy” plays, Romeo and Gavin (and the audience) are transported back into the urban greyness they walk everyday. The visual contrast, like in Loach’s 1969 feature, is also a social one. The kids live in a council estate, far from the picturesque British views advertised in glossy tourist brochures, and they experience far worse than having to choose between strawberry jam or marmalade at breakfast. Romeo (like Shaun in This is England) is longing for a substitute for his absentee father, while Gavin will experience a two-year isolation because of his physical handicap.

Menace looms and violence explodes in Meadows’ unflinching portrayals of loners, orphans and messed-up youths. In 24 7: Twenty Four Seven (1997), most of the bored Nottingham gang coaxed by Alan Darcy (Bob Hoskins) into his local boxing club will ultimately be decimated by the violence inflicted upon them within an unsympathetic and over-competitive society saturated with drugs and crime. As the Stranglers foretold in their 1977 anthem “No More Heroes”, the old values of conservative Britain, ferociously eroded by two decades of economic crisis and social turmoil, have become obsolete. Accordingly, Meadows’ unobtrusive yet unflinching camera lingers on outcasts, misfits and the mistreated. Some authority figures can be spotted in the bleak landscape, like the sympathetic and inspiring coach from 24 7, Cynthia (Jo Hartley), the concerned mother of This is England or Dek (Rhys Ifans), the reassuring garage manager from Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002). However, they are struggling with the label their entourage has granted them. If they conform to what society expects from them, they will sacrifice honesty and responsibility. But their ethics and relentless involvement in heralding lost causes might ultimately be detrimental.

And that’s how Meadows’ magic operates. From life observation and personal memories, he elaborates poignant characters with the help of his best friend and co-writer Paul Fraser (whose childhood infirmity was the inspiration for Romeo Brass) and fellow musician and actor Paddy Considine (whose original idea was the starting point for 2004’s Dead Man’s Shoes). Meadows’ characters may seem predictable but the motivations behind their stark actions and violent reactions are complex. Brilliantly assisted by cinematographers Ashley Rowe and Danny Cohen (for his first and last two features respectively), Meadows stages the rise, fall and redemption of these tormented souls among the soft black and white expressionist shots of 24 7 or the rain laden blues, greys and greens of Lancashire in Dead Man’s Shoes.

Music is another component of the magic. Omnipresent and potent, it permeates the films, propelling the action and creating an uplifting counterpoint to the drama.

As well as Scottish filmmaker Lynn Ramsay (Ratcatcher, 1999), the Nottingham director’s stark visual poetry brilliantly fuses microcosmos into macrocosmos, capturing the essence of an era through the dreams and misadventures of a geographically localised youth. Like Ramsay’s, his films are urban fairytale-like stories in which some of the characters are either dead or battling the phantoms of past memories. The viewers learn about Darcy’s story through his diary read by some of his former protégés. Near the beginning of Dead Man’s Shoes, the perturbed paratrooper played by Considine, returning to his hometown after a long absence to exact revenge on his disabled brother’s tormentors, comments on the ghostly atmosphere of his deserted teenage hangouts. His methodical revenge is also consigned in a clinically hand-written diary whose main entries are super-imposed on the images. Celia Haining, Lucas Roche and Chris Wyatt’s deft editing presents colourful reminiscences of childhood interspersed with monochrome flashbacks to the younger brother’s ordeal, emphasizing the unbearable yet necessary weight of collective memory.

Remembrance may be the tool for a community to let go of its past and built a better future, but Meadows’ films, if they acknowledge the power of dream and determination, also work as alarming documents on the state of a region. A pillar of this documentary aspect is the exceptional cast, which the director partly re-hires from one film to another. His approach to casting is similar to Ken Loach: “local” talent is preferable in order to preserve the authenticity of the environment he depicts. Considine (Morrel in Romeo Brass and Richard in Dead Man’s Shoes), MacClure (Ladine Brass, and Lol in This Is England) and Shim (Romeo Brass and Milky in This Is England) are the best examples. Meadows has a relaxed approach to working with his actors. Showing them the script, he loosely directs them, encouraging their personal input and improvisation in the name of authenticity. 18^th century French philosopher Denis Diderot would argue that the greatest actors are those who can distance themselves from the material they’re performing. The emotional involvement of Meadows’ cast in the harrowing material nonetheless works wonders, eliciting confident performances which encapsulate the eccentricities of his films.

If his determination to explore the smallest and seediest areas in Nottingham admittedly derives from an emotional attachment to the city and a desire to interrogate the reality behind the picturesque, it is also initiated by practical reasons. There is no need for an independent filmmaker to go to London when all the sound studios, editing equipment, technicians and talents are available locally. Besides, the local funding system helps regional directors throughout every thorny stage in the financing. Once Upon a Time in the Midlands’, a Film Four production, had an increased budget compared to Romeo Brass. Meadows chose to cast bigger names like Robert Carlyle and Rhys Ifans. He had to share the final cut and the finished product didn’t correspond to his initial vision. Meadows is now more than ever convinced that the power of his work relies on local resources and complete creative independence. Strengthened by the bitter experience, the Nottingham poet is back to what he does best: provoke, entertain and move. His uncompromising work is cinema at its meanest and funniest.

Things We Lost In The Fire - Review by Sandra Dupuy

Director: Susanne Bier
Screenwriter: Allan Loeb
Running Time: 115 mins
Certificate: 15
Released: Feb 1st

The family and its complex mechanics are at the heart of Dogma director Susanne Bier’s work. She has successfully tackled many related issues in previous Danish work like Open Hearts (2002), Brothers (2004) and After the Wedding (2006). Things We Lost in the Fire, her first foray into English language and Hollywood territory, picks up where After the Wedding had ended, a funeral.

The death of a loved one is the most damaging event one can experience. It leaves you feeling empty, guilty and cursing life’s futility. Such is widow Audrey Burke’s (Halle Berry) state of mind at the opening of the film. Impulsively befriending her husband Brian’s (David Duchovny) childhood friend Jerry Sunborne (Benicio Del Toro), a recovering addict, she navigates grief and denial with him until they build up strength to bounce back.

A gut-wrenching immersion into mourning and addiction, Things We Lost… does not quite possess the subtle poignancy of After the Wedding. However, Bier brings credibility and decency to Allan Loeb’s fairly flawed script. It is a masochistic pleasure to delve into Things we Lost… with an increasingly melancholy heart, thanks to its flowing and searching camera moves. The extreme close-ups on the characters’ eyes, abstract windows of their soul, lead us into a maze of emotions to painful to be uttered or confronted. Entrancing twilights, atmospheric palettes of unsaturated blues and greys and a haunting piano tune envelop Audrey, her children and Jerry’s sorrowful wanders with quiet compassion.

Though the ambiguous portrayal of Audrey Burke is Berry’s best performance since playing Leticia Musgrove in Mark Forster’s 2001 Monster’s Ball, a couple of scenes strongly hint at the quest for another Oscar. While Berry can play Audrey with alternate indifference, despair and ferocity without being completely compelling, Del Toro inhabits Jerry with such grace, guts and abandon that his portrait of a down-and-out junkie is the most intricate depiction of addiction and forsaken humanity ever to come to celluloid life. Some of Berry and Duchovny’s lines sound unrealistic and naïve, bordering on ludicrous, but Del Toro’s acting tour-de-force redeems narrative flaws and melodramatic outbursts alike. He is the film’s anchor, transforming Things We Lost in the Fire from what could have been a superior tear-jerker into a mesmerising study of love, loss and resilience.

In The Valley Of Elah - Review by Sandra Dupuy

Director: Paul Haggis
Screenwriter: Paul Haggis
Running Time: 121 mins
Certificate: 15
Released: January 25th

Labelling a film “Iraq war related drama” doesn’t make it bullet proof. Hackneyed topics, like countries’ responsibility in sending their youth abroad as canon fodder, have already been successfully tackled by American directors, from Dalton Trumbo and his unforgettable Johnny Got his Gun (1971) to Oliver Stone and his unforgiving Born on the 4th of July (1989).

But the U.S. of A. occasionally enjoy a bit of self-flogging. Drowning remorse in solemn Biblical tales is a good way of justifying ruthless foreign politics. It may well be a contrite perspective but has previously produced amazing cinema. Bitter, beautiful and thought provoking were Michael Cimino’s Deer Hunter (1978) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). These anti-war vehicles still stand as triumphs of cinematic art and storytelling. Alas, it isn’t the case for In the Valley of Elah. Equally bitter, but bleak and patronising, is Paul Haggis’s follow-up to Crash (2004).

The film’s based on Mark Boal’s article “Death and Disonhor” in Playboy Magazine (a safe quality criterion) and follows Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) in his search for son Mike (Jonathan Tucker), gone missing on his first week-end back from Iraq. Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), a police detective in the jurisdiction where Mike was last seen, reluctantly helps. As Hank and Emily struggle to keep control of the investigation, her missing person’s case starts to look like foul play and she’s caught in a fight with the military brass. When Mike’s questionable deeds in Iraq come to light, his father’s values are challenged.

Flawless performances from the leads and convincing portrayal of soldiers by experienced ex-military cannot dust off the annoying amount of clichés that drag the story down and remind you (as if you had forgotten!) that you’re in a Hollywood movie. Despite all the sourness and sorrow, Elah’s message hardly makes it unpatriotic or subversive now that every American official has admitted the war to be a policy failure.

Theron pursues her flawless career with a performance as powerful as it is understated. A small-town single mum, she struggles for respect, fighting Hank’s indiscriminate anger and the crassness of her chauvinistic colleagues. An entertaining cameo from flavour of the month Josh Brolin as her unsympathetic boss, who fancies himself as the local hunk, reinforces the notion that this is a world in which women are regarded as pea-brained sexual commodities. The story needed a counterpoint to Emily’s mix of fragility and daring, and Susan Sarandon, playing Hank’s wife Joan, masterfully provides it. She initially refused the part because of its shallowness, and despite some fleshing out, Joan remains a clichéd soldier’s wife: quiet, dignified and acquiescing, she’s part of the furniture, though Sarandon’s doing her best with her few lines.

Standing alone against the blind civilian and military bureaucracy, retired hero Tommy Lee Jones drags his leathery face and weather-beaten frame with rage and despair, as a man who’s lost touch with his time and long-held beliefs. His quest unfortunately takes too patriotic a tone as his macho side prompts him to take over Emily’s investigation, or show a private the proper way to raise the flag, only to turn it upside down later, a heavily symbolic sign of America’s distress.

Though Elah’s visually impressive with its washed-out colours and bleak open spaces, courtesy of cinematographer Roger Deakins (once again!) and though it displays some amazing acting numbers, it is not an in-depth illustration of the mechanics and consequences of war, focusing instead on feelings and reactions amplified by a whinging score. Haggis does possess technical skills and good intentions, however his self-confessed story of “good people who make terrible decisions” sounds shallow and biased.

When will we see an impartial American war film? The pill would have been easier to swallow if Iraqis civilians were portrayed as human beings instead of being merely alluded to, mistaken for dogs in the heat of the fight, or presented as fleeting silhouettes and lifeless bundles on the side of the road. The award-winning writer of Million Dollar Baby, Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo-Jima had better leave his comfort zone and sharpen his pencil, or Clint Eastwood (among others) will keep harvesting the fruit of his scripts.

Lust, Caution - Review by Sandra Dupuy

Director: Ang Lee
Screenwriter: James Schamus
Running Time: 157 mins
Certificate: 18
Released: Out Now!

Flesh is eagerly flaunted on screen provided it’s bashed, slashed and disposable. The deader the better. As soon as it becomes alive, animated by primal urges and spread in unorthodox positions, politicians and censors are desperate to restrict it and conjure it away before anyone has had a chance to judge its supposed nefarious effects. Ang Lee’s never shied away from controversial issues, such as homosexuality (the theme of 1993’s Wedding Banquet and 2005’s Brokeback Mountain) or swinging and sexual boredom (The Ice Storm,1997). The forces at work in Lust, Caution are even more complex than those forging a forbidden love-story or an impossible union.

The Taiwan-born director’s new epic opus mixing sex, espionage and political strife, showcases the union of two great talents, Hong-Kong star Tony Leung Chui Wai and newcomer Tang Wei. Adapted from a short- story by Eileen Chang, one of China’s most popular writers, the film’s set in 1942 Shangai under Japanese occupation. Young student Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei) gets involved in a patriotic stage troupe and a subsequent plot to kill Mr Yee (Tony Leung), a local businessman collaborating with the Japanese-ruled government of Wang Jingwei. Chia Chi’s task is to gain Yee’s confidence by becoming his lover. Three years after a failed attempt that ends in blood, she succeeds. However, subjugated by their love-making, her certainties waver and her loyalties become tangled.

Lust, Caution is all about make-believe and double meanings. The translation of the Chinese title itself misses most of the sense of the original. The Shanghainese words “lust” and “lost” are homophones, which raises the central tryst to an existential dimension. The lovers’ sexual abandon is a death sentence. At the same time, in an over-controlled environment compelling them to constant pretence and repression, sex is the only way for Yee and Chia Chi to feel, whether it’s rapture, anger or sorrow.

The second part of the title signifies warning and renunciation, while also alluding to the ring to be worn by Chia Chi. Yee, suave and chilling, embodies this duality. Aware that Chia Chi might be a spy, he never drops his guard. At the same time he’s on the verge of partially renouncing safety and power for her. As for Chia Chi, she’s the true giver who sacrifices herself, dropping all previous plans and beliefs out of honesty.

The war is both ubiquitous and virtually unseen. Ang Lee eloquently films long Mah-Jong sequences in which close-ups on Yee’s wife (Joan Chen) and her guests, quietly gossiping and complaining about war hardships in luxurious surroundings, convey the occupation’s brutality and paranoia. The crowd scenes in beautifully recreated 1940s Shanghai and Hong-Kong are peppered with Japanese uniforms on the watch. Yee’s handsome yet emotionless face is that of a man who’s traded his soul for his skin, and “is a bigger whore” than Chia Chi says she is. The young woman’s co-conspirators, eager to risk her life while blabbering endlessly about preposterous plans, are trapped in a conflict beyond their capability to solve.

Amidst the oppressive unrest, lust is as closely bound to caution as the lovers’ climax is to their fear of being found out or betrayed. Consequently, Ang Lee’s staging of the much discussed sex scenes is uncompromising. Unglamorous and disturbing (the first scene between Yee and Chia Chi equals a rape), these deceptively short episodes boldly communicate the sound and the fury long buried in characters who never are what they seem, and never can tell how they feel. You can almost smell the sweat and tears. Tang Wei is convincing both as an ingénue and a Mata-Hari, while Tony Leung’s chilling portrait of a serial traitor oscillates between detachment, sadism and sadness. Graphic and clumsy, sex in Lust, Caution is the only outlet for emotional turmoil, as opposed to a seedy commodity. Yee and Chia Chi’s conflicting moments in love replicate the cry of a torn nation.

The story at the heart of Lust, Caution is as troubled and restrained as Brokeback Mountain’s was outspoken and pure. It may not give itself away willingly, even after two and a half hours, but once you’re immersed in it you won’t want it to end. Hats off to Ang Lee for his brave new move on the chessboard of passion!

No Country For Old Men - Review by Sandra Dupuy

Directors: Joel & Ethan Coen
Screenwriters: Joel & Ethan Coen
Running Time:122 mins
Certificate: 18
Released: Jan 18th

An ambient cinematic mood, darkly reflecting contemporary angst and post-war guilt, has pervaded our screens in the last few months with nostalgic chases (The Assassination of Jesse James…) or pseudo-political wanders (In the Valley of Elah). Rarely have ruthless killers been so much in fashion since Hannibal Lecter’s celluloid reign. Accordingly, the Coen brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 No Country for Old Men signs their return to shooting shape and boldly depicts a new breed of ruthless maniac, the moptop page boy from hell.

No Country for Old Men is structurally reminiscent of the Texas noir of their debut, Blood Simple (1983) and possesses the bleakness of Fargo (1996) as well as the random brutality of Miller’s Crossing (1990). A stark tale set in 80s West Texas; it stages the implacable wreckage of three men with utterly conflicting moral codes. Vietnam vet’ and obstinate pronghorn hunter Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles upon a drug deal gone wrong. Barely acknowledging the slaughtered Mexicans, dead dogs and heroin stash, he seizes (a tad too eagerly) a suitcase containing two million dollars. A remorseful nightly venture back to the fly-infested crime scene triggers a merciless manhunt in which blood-curdling assassin Anton Chighur (Javier Bardem) and melancholy sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) crisscross paths and slowly circle Moss in desolate wide-open landscapes under scorching south-western skies.

Forget Brad Pitt’s tormented Jesse James and Johnny Depp’s singing slasher Sweeney Todd, Bardem’s sententious executioner Chigurh is the real McCoy. His unspeakable name, mispronounced as “Sugar”, is both absurd and redolent of the evil he scatters through parched country vistas and blood-smeared motel rooms with his slaughterhouse stun-gun. Impassive and effective, he removes his own bullets with the quiet determination a human Terminator. Though the Coens have adapted MacCarthy’s novel almost verbatim, Bardem appropriates words and actions with intense exultation, a hint of a smirk here, mad bulging eyes there. His pensive pre-murder soliloquies, coupled with Roger Deakins’s stark cinematography and Carter Burwell’s stormy-sounding score, brilliantly contribute to the maintenance of insufferable anxiety in the audience.

No Country for Old Men may recall Anthony Mann’s formal classicism and Sam Peckinpah’s brutal machismo, but it’s no pointless academic exercise. The directors have stamped their unique touch through stylish framing, crepuscular photography, and most of all impeccable cast choice. Oddball secondary characters like western-suited hitman Carson Wells (the hilarious Woody Harrelson) or cancer-ridden Agnes (Beth Grant) bring welcome comic relief and steal the show, in the manner of John Turturro’s inimitable Jesus Quintana from The Big Lebowski (1998). Themes like chance and fate as accessories to an irreversible chain of events are part and parcel of the Coen’s body of work. The working determinism of No Country… sets off increasingly powerless characters, both hunters and hunted, caught in a trap of lies and pathetic lack of luck.

The maverick brothers are quickly climbing back the slope that threatened to send them into oblivion. After perpetrating such deadly disappointments as the superficial Untolerable Cruelty (2003) or the loathsome remake of Alexander Mackendrick’s Ladykillers (2004), they finally deliver a mature thriller of excruciating tension and mesmerising violence. No Country for Old Men is the sparest movie they’ve made. It’s arid, it’s gripping, it’s awesome. Will rolling Anton finally gather Moss? Don’t wait to check it out.

Bee Movie - Review by Sandra Dupuy

Director: Steve Hickner & Simon J. Smith
Screenwriter: Jerry Seinfeld & Spike Feresten
Running Time: 90 mins
Certificate: U
Released: Out now

Seinfeld is back! But not with George, Kramer or Elaine. Deadpan Jerry is back as a bee. The story would have it that the comedian, in an effort to revive a dinner conversation with Spielberg, blurted out an idea about a bee comedy. His improbable collaboration with DreamWorks raises Bee Movie above the company’s trademark mix of pop satire and cheap slapstick, bordering on crass with the Shrek sequels.

Jerry Seinfeld provides the voice for Barry B. Benson, a young bee who has just graduated (with “a perfect report card: all B’s”) and is about to start working for Honex, a honey corporation which hasn’t give a bee a day off in 27 million years. Barry’s not sure what job to choose. His nerdy friend Adam (Matthew Broderick) accepts his drone future but Barry yearns to do something more than spend his entire bug life carrying out the same rote job. In a bravado moment, he signs up with the “Pollen Jocks”, chesty heroes who are the only bees allowed high-speed pollinating air raids outside the hive.

The opening scenes are incredibly inventive. With everything blobby and bright, the hive’s visual world resembles a sweet and sunny version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, peopled by buzzing black and yellow Barry look-alikes, bearing customized antennae that swiftly change into hand-free phones. Outside the hive, the squadron’s flight into New-York is a bravura piece in which a swirling camera moves from Central Park’s vibrant flora to the flying surface of a tennis ball to a roller-coaster jaunt in a speeding car.

Barry’s most hilarious encounter is with Mooseblood the Mosquito (an insanely funny Chris Rock) during a wild ride on a truck’s windshield. Contrarily to Eddie Murphy’s innocuous and servile donkey, Rock ventures into making fun of blacks and his frantic identity riffs on his brethren– they’re so despicable female mosquitoes want to “trade them up for moths” - give the film, otherwise soft and fuzzy, the hint of a sting.

However, as soon as Barry ventures into the human world, the rest of the movie is pretty conventional. The maverick bee’s close encounter with kind florist Vanessa Bloome (Renee Zellweger, whose syrupy voice is still more bearable than all her squints and pouts) is bound to sink into sticky terrain, all the more because Vanessa and her bee-allergic lug of a boyfriend (Patrick Warburton) gesticulate and make faces in an exaggerated and mechanical way.

Bee Movie’s major hitch lies in its bland visual characterization. One of Seinfeld’s main comedy assets lies in the use of his face as a major medium of expression. The success of the 90s eponymous series relied on the comedian’s practised timing and delivery but most of all on his physical presence, the narrowing of his eyes and the raising of his eyebrows, or the absence of it for a deadpan effect. Unfortunately, Seinfeld’s onscreen incarnation, a computer-animated bee with a banal plastic-looking face, doesn’t help identifying with hero Barry. Nor does the shallow emotional range the comedian displays. While Chris Rock’s high-pitched ranting rap does wonders, Seinfeld’s performance, from mildly puzzled to moderately pleased, is far from enthralling.

The film contains nonetheless enough eye-candy and witty one-liners like the TiVo one (“You mean they can freeze live TV? That’s insane!”) to satisfy kids and adults alike. The second part plunges us into a satirical courtroom plot that erupts just as the love story’s getting too sweet. Barry discovers that the honey manufactured by bigwigs Honron and Honeyburton is stolen from captive bees to be sold in supermarkets. He decides to sue the human race to get back the sticky gold. Some of the nastiest and best jokes are directed at Ray “He’s no goodfella, he’s a BADfella!” Liotta (who produces his own honey brand) and John Goodman steals the show as an over-the-top Southern lawyer.

Despite Seinfeld’s enthusiastic involvement as Bee Movie’s main screenwriter and performer, the funniest moments of the film seem to happen when he’s in the background. Chris Rock’s funky mosquito, for instance, deserves a whole film to himself. It’s a shame, considering how brilliantly the series commented on the routine of everyday life. So it may not be the bee’s knees, as far as Seinfeld fans are concerned, but it’s the most decent DreamWorks toon in a long time: a sweet slice of entertainment, at times truly beguiling.

Seraphim Falls - Review by Sandra Dupuy

Director: David Von Ancken
Screenwriters: David Von Ancken & Abby Everett Jacques
Running time: 115 mins
Certificate: 15
Release date: 24th August

Pierce Brosnan was a jerky headless corpse trying to catch its talking head in Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! (1996), a Casanova killer in The Matador (Richard Shepard, 2005), and is now a ghoulish stranger haunted by his past in Seraphim Falls (2006).

TV director’s David Von Ancken’s first feature film presents unfortunate similarities with Andre De Toth’s harrowing Day of the Outlaw (1959) or the intense western The Proposition (John Hillcoat, 2005). Skillfully filmed on location by Oscar-winning cinematographer John Toll, it tells the tired post Civil War tale of Confederate hunter Colonel Carver (Liam Neeson) and hunted outlaw Gideon (Brosnan) through the Wild West.

In disguise under bushy eyebrows and a Hagrid-esque beard, ex-Bond Brosnan staggers his way through icy snow and bare vistas, bearing his secret as painfully as Greek giant Atlas carried the world. Nearly drowned, stabbed and shot many times, the former embodiment of American TV series' private eye Remington Steele (1982) is now attempting to play a new sort of MacGiver. Trying during two never-ending hours to lose his hunters, he cures his wounds with gun powder and a knife bigger than Paul Hogan’s Crocodile Dundee’s.

The other actors’ performances are reduced to facial tics and deeply unmeaningful stares, except for Michael Winicott's, ironic as usual. Winicott is the sole survivor of a waste of talents such as Liam Neeson, condemned to heroic parts since Neal Jordan’s 1996 Michael Collins. Angelica Huston’s cameo adds nothing, and her efforts to spice it up are vain.


New-Mexico and Oregon’s wilderness are stunning locations for swashbuckling, pistol shooting and horse kicking, and Clint Eastwood’s Man-with-no-name, popping up to offer some soft-spoken advice, wouldn’t be out of place. However, Von Ancken is not Sergio Leone yet, and Pierce’s performance doesn’t possess the required intensity to carry the lead role. The over-indulgence in violence gets tiring after an hour, while each scene is ridiculously stretched in order to make up for the futile dialogues. Seraphim Falls for stylish cinematography over screenplay substance.

Montage Revokes Your License! This Week: Gerard Depardieu-By Sandra Dupuy

Once upon a time in the thriving dump of Châteauroux, France, there was an unruly young man born of alcoholic working-class parents. Blessed with awkward charm and a bubbly personality, his lust for life took him from rag to riches, mean streets to stardom, tarts and thugs to theatre. Yes, Gérard, it is you we are talking about.

You were once a respected actor, one of the best French cinema had ever fostered. You weren't classically handsome, but your sturdy physique and your onscreen charisma could be compared to that of a young Jean Gabin or a steamy early Brando. You also displayed a rare mischievous 70s sensibility, as well as a flair for difficult but rewarding career moves. You're now a winemaker-cum-wino billionaire with a Gargantuan gut and a brain the size of a pickled grape. You pick your roles the way you wear your clothes, dreadfully. O Gérard, what happened to thee?

At the beginning of the 70s, Alain Delon (Le Samourai, 1967), Jean-Paul Belmondo (A bout de Souffle, 1960), Catherine Deneuve (Belle de Jour, 1967) and Jeanne Moreau (Jules et Jim, 1962) were already established as French icons and consumate thespians. The Nouvelle Vague was long gone, and French cinema needed a breath of fresh air. You put a spell on the big screen in 1972, in Bertrand Blier's erotic road/buddy movie Les Valseuses/ Going Places, stealing the show from a zany Patrick Dewaere and a bimboesque Miou-Miou. With your long hair, your cheeky grin and your self-assured yet sensitive performance, you were the new sensation.
Les Valseuses boosted your reputation, and after great collaborations with Italian mavericks Bernardo Bertolucci in 1900 (1976), and Marco Ferreri in Rêve de Singe (1978), you worked with up-and-coming French director André Téchiné in Barocco (1976), and again with Blier in his 1979 Buffet Froid, a masterpiece of absurdity.

You were ready to tackle the 80s with the fierce enthusiasm of a bull bolting into the arena, accumulating films like others eat croissants. 1980 was the first of many increasingly ambitious, then pompous, then tedious 'Depardieu years'. Every director under the celluloid sun wanted you. Alain Resnais with Mon Oncle d'Amérique, Maurice Pialat with Loulou, and François Truffaut with Le Dernier Métro gave you some of your best parts, in a mix of arthouse experiments and blockbusters à la française. But you already displayed a lack of restraint which would later become your downfall. Claude Zidi's Inspecteur La Bavure, a vulgar Farelli-Brothers-type comedy, shot the same year, did not compare with the aforementioned classics, though you were almost funny in it.

You then moved from social experiment to period drama, portraying French Revolution hero Danton, in Polish prodigy Andrej Wajda's eponymous film. All of us kids in Primary School had to suffer your phallic nose and high-pitched voice for three long hours, supposedly because Danton was a great historical document. We secretly cheered at the end of the film when a dignified Danton, his curly-haired teddybear head ready for the chop, said to the executioner: « Show my head to the people, it is really worth it» (he was probably talking about his bouffant perm). Thank God, we all thought, no more Depardieu for another year!

Not content with acting, you decided to plague the shiny happy people of France with your own creation, a rigid and humourless staging of Molière's ferocious attack on religious hypocrisy, Le Tartuffe (1984). Your film, austere though not devoid of visual quirks, such as the clash between your tarty make-up and your black biggot outfit, didn't agree with French critics' sensitive stomachs, and they panned it.

The end of the 80s were a reasonable vintage, and Claude Berri blessed you with the rôle of the hunchback in Jean de Florette (1986), a moving adaptation of Marcel Pagnol's classic. The overwhelming shadow of the great Raimu (writer and director Pagnol's favorite interpreter) looming over you made your part even harder to play, but you met the challenge with a tear-jerking performance. You came back to Blier with the grating 1986 Tenue de Soirée (where you played insecure Michel Blanc's junkie whore), and acted in another great Pialat, Sous Le Soleil De Satan (Cannes' 1986 Palme d'Or). Cinematographer Bruno Nuytten's first directed film, Camille Claudel, showcased an extraordinary performance by Isabelle Adjani as 19^th century pedantic poet Paul Claudel's misunderstood sister. The film also displayed your barely tolerable act as Camille Claudel's paunchy and aging lover, sculptor Auguste Rodin.

The weight of years was starting to have an unforgiving effect on your increasingly plump person, and your booming wine business didn't help. You drank heavily, partied loudly, and rode your motorbikes carelessly, multiplying driving accidents and inebriated appearances on French talk-shows. In a word, you'd gone from fit to fat, and people started calling you «gros Gégé».

1990 was the year of your resurrection. You picked up the rôle of Cyrano de Bergerac where French theatre actor Daniel Sorano had left it, in the dust, and redynamised a classic. Director Jean-Paul Rappeneau cleverly adapted Edmond Rostand's play by using most of the original dialogues, and changed the bizarre love triangle into a fantastic fresco full of filth and fury. Your efforts paid this time, and you were awarded the prize for best male performance in Cannes.

So why oh why did you have to throw yourself into the first Hollywood merde passing by? Though Andie MacDowell's commitment brought sensitivity to Peter Weir's shallow rom-com Green Card (1990), your fleeting part, if entertaining, was a jumble of clichés about the French, which your poor performance corroborated. Once again, Gérard, eet eez not true zat all French people speak like zat, and zey don't always plant tomatoes on zeir balconies while drinking a leetle glass ov Saint-Emilion eizer.

It all went downhill from there. Rappeneau, who had offered you Cyrano on a silver plate, only gave you a small part in Le Hussard Sur Le Toit in 1995. Let's face it: your horseman would have been huffing and puffing all the way up Provence hills in a Sancho Panza manner, while Kylie Minogue and Juliette Binoche's former hunk, Olivier Martinez, with his natural elegance, made up for a shocking lack of talent. You also swapped adventurous directors for expensive production makers like Claude Berri (Germinal, 1993), or plain bomb droppers like Gérard Lauzier (Mon père ce héros, 1991), Steve Miner ( My Father The Hero, its 1994 mediocre Hollywood remake), Jean-Marie Poiré ( Les Anges Gardiens, 1995), and good old Zidi again (Astérix et Obélix contre César, 1999).

As for commenting on your choice of Norman Jewison's 1996 rubbish (and self-explanatory) Bogus, with poor support from weepy Whoopi (Goldberg), and Ariel Zeitoun's unwatchable Bimboland (1998)), the chatterbox I usually am is speechless. You even managed to catch the uneven Ridley Scott on a very (and I'm choosing my words carefully here), very bad day. Agreeing to play Christopher Colombus (who, in passing, was a Genoese navigator, not a French ned) in 1492 was such a stupid decision my brain still cringes thinking about it. Did you really think Vangelis's three note score would save the day?

Poor Gégé, with your regular binges, your devil-may-care attitude and your ill-advised picks, it looks like you're on an icy slope, about to slip into oblivion. Having Fidel Castro for a friend may help you puff on free cigars, but it won't resurrect your wheezy career. O Gérard, were art thou? Haste ye back with mesmerizing material and powerful performances for your license has now been revoked! And frankly, mon amour, I don't give a damn!