“Cecelia was the first to go.” And so starts the first film directed by Sofia Coppola, daughter of Francis Ford and miscast daughter of Michael Corleone in the Godfather III. This was my second time seeing this film, and I enjoyed it even more the second time round. The film centres around the five daughters of the Lisbon family 25 years ago in Michigan - Cecelia [13], Lux [14], Bonnie [15], Mary [16] and Terese [17].

In her disillusionment with the world, more trees being cut down and animals becoming extinct every day, Cecelia attempts suicide but is rushed off to hospital just in time. When a male doctor tries to tell the girl that things aren’t that bad, she returns with one of the film’s classic lines. “Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a 13-year old girl.”

The Lisbon parents, a strict Catholic mother (played by Kathleen Turner) and a hapless mild-mannered Maths teacher (an unusually understated performance from the normally maniacal James Woods), decide to try and let their daughters mix more with the boys of the neighbourhood by inviting them over for dinners and parties on the advice of psychologist Dr. E.M. Horniker (short cameo by Danny DeVito - why the credits listed a stand-in for him I’ll probably never know). This does little to lift young Cecelia’s spirits, and she succeeds where she failed before.

The film moves on to focus on second youngest daughter Lux (Kirsten ‘Interview with the Vampire’ Dunst), and her relationship with school heartthrob Trip Fontaine. Unfortunately, the characters of the elder three sisters are left undeveloped and it’s hard to feel much sympathy for them when they are grounded by their parents after Lux fails to come home from a homecoming dance with Trip.

The film is interesting in that it is not narrated by any of the Lisbons or Trip, but rather from the viewpoint of one of a group of boys obsessed both with the sisters and also with collecting anything linked to them.

The second time around you sometimes notice something that perhaps shouldn’t be, like the news reporter who says she’s from ‘Channel 2′ appearing on ‘News Channel 8′, or an error in the number PI over Mr. Lisbon’s blackboard [okay, now I'm nitpicking!]. But apart from the hollow sisters, I really liked this film from the Coppolas [producer was Francis Ford and second unit director was Roman].

It also features a brilliant soundtrack by one of my favourite groups, the French band Air, with songs like “Ce Matin La” and constant reworkings of “Playground Love” which I just had to go and buy afterwards and it’s still vibraphoning in my head as I write! The film is based on a novel by Jefffrey Eugenides.

***1/2

I went to this film knowing practically nothing about it apart from the title and the fact that I saw Tom Green on the poster. For those of you who are MTV-illiterate, Tom Green is the absolutely crazy presenter of “The Tom Green Show” which is like no hosted show you’ve ever seen before. Ranging from setting himself on the fire in the street to putting a dead cow’s head in his parents’ bed, Tom is the ultimate reaction seeker and his shows on MTV Dark (late at night!) are always good for a laugh if you like that kind of thing.

Anyway, the first face that appears on screen is Tom who plays an eternal student called Barry [Manilow]. He seems pretty normal as he gives a group a guided tour around his University of Ithaca campus, but as he relates his version of the facts about the college it becomes obvious to the tour group and to us that he doesn’t have a clue about the place. They complain to him that it’s the worst tour they’ve ever been on and probably the worst college they’ve seen (they’ve obviously never done a tour of a shopping mall) and he replies that this university was the setting for one of the greatest stories of all time.

[SPOILER]

Of course he then has to tell the story, which revolves around a student called Josh who falls in love with a college girl called Beth even though he has been having a long term long distance relationship with another girl called Tiffany who has moved to Austin, Texas. The basic premise is that Josh has been recording video messsages to post to Tiffany, but a friend of his accidentally mails a sex video of Josh and Beth to Tiffany (who is away for a few days at a relation’s funeral). Josh and a couple of buddies have to make a road trip to Austin to retrieve the video before Tiffany returns from the funeral.

The buddies are E.L., played by typecast Seann W. Scott who gets a cheer as soon as he first appears on screen [no doubt from those remembering him as Stifler from "American Pie" or more recently Billy from "Final Destination"], and Rubin, a regular pot-smoker with a pet snake. They persuade a mild-mannered skinny geek called Kyle to drive them in his dad’s Ford Taurus.

Buddy Barry Manilow (Tom Green) is left in charge of Rubin’s pet snake and is supposed to feed it a mouse every few days - we have some hilarious scenes with Barry showing the non-hungry snake exactly how to eat the mouse, and eventually getting into a fight with the snake.

Meanwhile, the journey is going so terribly wrong for the main characters that it looks like there’s no hope of things ever righting themselves. The buddies total the car after a ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ style ravine jump and then run out of money less than halfway through the trip. But I’ll leave it at that and ruin no more, I’ll just say there’s plenty more memorable moments to enjoy: the viagra-taking grandpa, the mistaken identity incident in Boston, E.L.’s sperm donation, and the over-romantic tour guide.

Fans of American Pie will love this teen flick, and I can honestly say that I laughed most of the way through the film. It could have done with some more of Tom Green’s mad antics, but I’m sure we’ll see more of that on the big screen in the future.

**1/2

The Farrelly Brothers (”There’s Something About Mary”, “Dumb and Dumber”) bring us another dose of overdone toilet humour with this comedy about a schizophrenic Rhode Island policeman (Charlie - Jim Carrey) who ends up on the run with a woman (Irene - Renee Zellwegger from “Jerry Maguire”) being chased by her criminal ex-boyfriend and the corrupt feds working for him.

That’s about it from the plot side of things, in fact if they’d left out the whole weak plot and boring character empathy parts, I’d probably have enjoyed it exactly the same and been out of the cinema sooner because I felt the film sagged in between Carrey’s crazy performances.

I also couldn’t see the reason for the big American hype over the three triplet sons of Carrey’s character (okay, there’s an initial laugh factor because they are [1] big, [2] black, [3] super-smart and [4] obviously not his sons!) - they were on Jay Leno last week and he was predicting big things for them, I’m not so sure…

I _can_ see big things happening for Jim Carrey who was cruelly passed over for Academy Awards for both “The Truman Show” and “Man on the Moon” where he showed he can act seriously as well as comedically. The thing about Carrey is that he has this mad double jointed face and body that can crack you up with laughter one minute, and his big brown sad eyes can have you feeling sympathy for him the next.

While I expect he will gain Oscar recognition for his more serious roles eventually, I hope he never gives up his funny side because he is the captain of comedy at the moment.

Best scenes - the dead cow, Hank’s first appearance, Anna Kournikova’s boyfriend, and the cotton mouth syndrome!

**

“If somebody is to achive what they desire, somebody else has to pay. But Alexei is fully aware of that. He is ready.” So goes the slogan for the French film East-West by Regis Wargnier, I’m not sure was that translated directly from French to English as it reads a little strangely. But the film’s English subtitles suffer from no such problem with the spoken language switching from French to Russian unknownst to the viewer.

Sony Pictures Classics bring us this interesting tale of a young Russian doctor with a French wife and son who decide to move to the new USSR when an amnesty is offered to the millions of Russians who fled the country 30 years earlier after the 1917 civil war.

The mood on the boat from France to Russia is cheerful, with many looking forward to seeing their home country (or soon to be adoptive home country for the French and second-generation Russian emigrants). However, the happy feeling turns to fear soon after arrival as soldiers split up families and eventually shoot a second-generation Russian when he tries to rejoin his father in another group.

This sets the tone for the rest of the film as Dr. Alexei and wife Marie quickly realise their new life is not the ideal existence it was purported to be. They are forced to share a house (and later on their own room) with a number of families in Kiev.

[SPOILER]

The doctor then has an affair with nosey neighbour Olga in the house, this put me off a bit because the adversity seemed to be bringing the Russian-French family together and I didn’t understand why he would have such a sudden character change. His wife didn’t understand either and kicked him out of their room, soon afterwards developing a relationship with a young swimmer named Sacha.

Famous French actress Catherine Deneuve appears as a famous French actress touring with a stage production of Victor Hugo’s “Marie Tudor”. The real Marie (Dr. Alexei’s wife) asks for help from the actress to escape from the USSR, and actress pledges to help. Sacha is also infected by the desire to flee from east to west, and his love for Marie drives him to train for the Russian swimming team travelling to Vienna in the hope that he could hide there and she could join him later.

Our faith in the good doctor is semi-restored around this point when it emerges that he has apparently been sleeping with neighbour Olga so that she would not have a chance to make her regular reports on his French wife to the secret service (all foreigners are imperialist spies apparently!).

The film has plenty of tension too with Sacha’s six-hour (sped up for dramatic purposes) ten-mile swim towards freedom and Marie’s encounter with a communist security checkpoint outside the potential safety of a French embassy (I haven’t said if either of them make it so you’ll have to see it for yourself!).

I need to confirm if the film is based on a true story or not as it has some of those character paragraphs at the end that tell you what happened to the people after the film’s story ends. With a fine score by Patrick Doyle, the film is definitely worth viewing for French film fans and Russian history buffs alike. Running time is around two hours.

***

From director Bryan Singer (”Usual Suspects”, “X-Men”) comes an adaptation of a novella of the same name by Stephen King about a former Nazi officer living in the USA who is recognised by a smart local teenager called Tom Bowden.

Cocky Tom (Brad Renfro) confronts the German ‘Janker’ (Ian “Richard III” McKellan) with the evidence he has been collecting - photographs from history books on the holocaust (personal hobby of his) and photographs from the present after the teen spots the Nazi on a bus ride, fingerprints from the German’s postbox and matching sets from the Israeli criminal database. Tom threatens to call the police unless Janker tells him everything he wants to know about the war - “what they’re afraid to tell us in school”.

After an initial period of denying he was a soldier and claiming to be just an ordinary US citizen (with a strong German accent!), Janker relents under pressure of police involvement.

[SPOILER]

Tom starts to spend evenings at the German’s house, forcing him to relive horrifying tales of gas chambers and ovens and even to wear an SS uniform at one point. McKellan is truly chilling when dressed up and even scares the emotionless teenager when he enters Nazi marching and saluting mode.

Bowden’s father (Bruce Davison, the senator from “X-Men”) invites the old man (that Tom has been ‘reading’ to) over for dinner, and it is around this point that Tom’s life has become so entangled with the Nazi’s (and so haunted by nightmares of his stories) that he can no longer out the German without acknowledging his own complicity.

His control over the situation and hold over Janker begins to slip, and with school grades dropping he is called in for a meeting with guidance counsellor Edward French (David Schwimmer plays the curly haired and mustachioed geek with a good heart). Janker impersonates Tom’s grandfather in this meeting and explains that the boy’s problems stem from his parents’ excessive drinking and fighting (lies, all lies).

We’re not sure is Janker truly an evil character (even though he certainly looks like the really evil twin of Max Von Sydow on a very bad day) or was he doing “what had to be done” under orders - until the scene with the cat.

I’ll try not to ruin any more of the film in case you haven’t seen it, director Singer was aware that the sensitive nature of the film could cause problems but has dealt with it well by “telling the truth” as he said himself.

The film’s strength lies in the two main actors. Ian McKellan is perfect in this role - he has the old German accent with a Californian twinge (very different from his normal polished Shakespearean tones), silver hair / wrinkles / liver spots courtesy of his makeup artist from “Richard”, and lots of padding to give him that stooped over look. Newcomer Brad Renfro is excellent too as the nasty youth who picks up traits and tactics from the old German - apparently he is a Stephen King fan and when he heard they were filming THE “Apt Pupil” he just had to be in it.

***1/2