I was sad to hear this morning that “Superman” actor Christopher Reeve has died aged 52. He had been quite ill for the past few weeks after suffering a cardiac arrest and then falling into a coma.
Reeve also starred in the TV series “Smallville” as Dr. Virgil Swann, and was replaced in a recent episode by his Superman co-star Margot Kidder due to ill health.
I was in Paris at the weekend and went to the launch of the Star Wars trilogy in FNAC on the Champs Elysees after midnight on the 21 September. Had to queue for three hours from 10 PM but did manage to get my Empire Strikes Back DVD signed by R2D2 (Kenny Baker) and Boba Fett (Jeremy Bulloch) which was cool. Funny thing was that I was unknowingly sitting beside the same Kenny Baker on a hop-on hop-off tour bus that very afternoon, not knowing that I’d be queueing up to get my DVD signed by him later on.
I was also in the Virgin megastore on Champs Elysees earlier that day. They also had a Star Wars theme going with a number of stormtroopers (both episode I and IV variations) patrolling the store, looking pretty sinister and peering over people’s shoulders. I didn’t notice one of them beside me until I had picked up a Battlestar Galactica box set (shaped with a Cylon’s head) to look at; no doubt I’ve now been marked as a rebel in their files.
Sometimes it’s hard to judge a film by audience reaction, but from the amount of people who waited for the very last film credit I’d say this movie went down well. Director Mike Figgis (who brought us the cheerful, sorry, tearful “Leaving Las Vegas”) breaks new ground with this concept whereby the screen is broken up into four parts, each quarter displaying a unique camera angle and all views filmed simultaneously in real time.
The trailer poses the question “would you like to know where your partner goes when they leave your side” and I had assumed this referred to the fact that they would then be picked up by another of the four cameras in this film and we (the audience) would see for ourselves. Actually it has a double meaning because one of the characters in the film manages to find out what her partner is doing when they are apart, but not with the aid of our multiple viewpoints.
[SPOILER]
Jeanne Tripplehorn places a small microphone on her suspected cheating lover Salma Hayek, and her worst fears are confirmed when she hears her girlfriend having an affair with a film producer called Alex. Just to give you an example of what is on-screen at any one time - we have (1) Tripplehorn’s shocked reaction as she listens to (2) Hayek and the “Alex” character making love behind a film screen, (3) a group of movie executives previewing a film on the same screen but oblivious to what’s going on behind it, and (4) Alex’s wife (Saffron Burrows) who is wandering around aimlessly after telling her husband she is leaving him. The audio fades in and out so that you aren’t overwhelmed, usually one but no more than two views are made audible at any one time.
The film _was_ made in one continuous shoot at 3 PM on 19-11-1999, and this makes the film surprisingly easy to follow as no Pulp Fiction chronological brain adjustments are required but we still get the four (or more) separate stories. Glenne Headley, Holly Hunter and Kyle MacLachlan also star in supporting roles. I’m not sure how well this film will transfer to the small screen (if at all), perhaps if they release it on four separate video tapes or discs it could then be watched on four TV screens!
Watch out for the earthquake tremor scenes as they are very well choreographed, I did think I saw an extra hand keeping a door open for a cameraman at one point when Hayek entered the bathroom - with so much going on it’s the kind of film you could go see again and again.
***
I can just imagine the sales pitch for this film now:
“You remember ‘Mrs. Doubtfire with that zany dude Robin Williams right? Okay, okay, now do you remember ‘Stakeout’ with Richard Dreyfuss and that Martin Sheen’s kid, eh… Eh… Emilio Estefez, that’s him, yeah? Sure, great films - well, we have a definite winner here, it’s a mixture of those two films and with black actors so everyone will enjoy it!”
Unfortunately, the number of hearty audience laughs during this film equalled the number of hairs on Homer Simpson’s head - not very many. Martin (”Bad Boys”) Lawrence is an FBI agent and master of disguise called Malcolm who goes deep undercover as the quite large grandmother of a young woman and son who are hiding from her ex-boyfriend, an escaped murderer [he doesn't look exactly like her "Big Momma" but it's been a while since they've seen each other so...].
In fact the plot is pretty much all “Stakeout” as the real Malcolm introduces himself as a handyman neighbour and gets friendly with the lady. And of course his FBI partner (across the street from Big Momma’s house) is doing his nut when he sees all this on the video camera.
But we also have this Big Momma character who can be quite amusing in short spells (but the novelty wore off sometime in nineteen-ninety-whenever “Doubtfire” was released). It’s a pity that Lawrence just doesn’t seem to be able to live up to the more recent comparable performances of Eddie Murphy in the “Nutty Professor” / “Klumps”. And the kid factor does not do anything for the film either.
“Big Momma’s House” has already been parodied in “Scary Movie” (and they were only released a month or so apart!) - I don’t think that normally happens with comedies. I wouldn’t waste my time again, I had seen the other two of three films being shown in the cinema so decided to give it a go…
*
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
From the creators of Oscar winning animation shorts “Wallace and Gromit” comes the first feature length film in a set of five contracted by Spielberg’s Dreamworks company. Not only is this film great fun but you appreciate it all the more when you realise it took around six years to produce the finished product, with two or three seconds of footage recorded daily [Hmmm, 2 seconds a day for 6 years gives 70 minutes of film, and 3 seconds a day gives 105 minutes of film, okay that sounds about right!].
Neither absent-minded inventor Wallace nor his trusty hound Gromit make an appearance here, instead the film centres around the chicken coop of Tweedy Farm and the many escape plots being hatched (sorry) by the hens therein to leave its fenced off confines. All seems lost when plan after plan is foiled by Mr. Tweedy and his farmdogs, and ringleader Ginger is about to give up hope when Rocky the “Flying” Rooster falls from the sky into their farm.
When the evil Mrs. Tweedy buys a chicken pie machine, Rocky (Australian Mel Gibson does the arrogant, self-centered Yank thing to a tee) is forced to teach the rest of the chickens how to fly the coop.
Chick jokes and puns abound in this film, but my favourite part is when the chickens begin their escape - Mr. Tweedy sees them and shouts to his wife that “the chickens are revolting” and she (hating the hens and taking the other meaning) agrees that they are indeed revolting.
I saw this film in the States with a mixture of children and adults, and I’m not sure if first of all they understood a lot of the Britspeak like “nowt” and “holidays” etc., and secondly I wonder if all the hens didn’t look the same to the younger kids (they seemed a bit restless at the beginning before Rocky popped in).
However everyone coming out of the cinema seemed to have enjoyed it immensely, some saying it was their second trip, and this grown up will return as well.
****
“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.
***
Final Destination is the first film from director James Wong, and is produced by associate Glen Morgan. Wong and Morgan are more well known for their work directing and producing for the small screen, mainly on “The X-Files”. They are also responsible for the short lived series “Space: Above and Beyond” where Earth’s space marine corps battled against a hostile alien race known as the ‘Chigs’ for two seasons.
The duo are on familiar territory here with this supernatural tale of a New York student who saves the lives of five friends and a teacher when he has a premonition that the plane they are supposed to take to Paris on a school trip is about to explode. The lucky group are pulled off the plane just before takeoff by airport security when Alex (the main prophet dude) starts to rave about an explosion, and sure enough it disintegrates when a few minutes airborne.
[SPOILER]
Now that’s all well and good, and you might think this is a film about someone who knows when people are going to die or when disasters are going to happen (a typical X-Files storyline). But it eventually becomes apparent that death wants to finish off the seven survivors in the order that they should have died were they still on the plane. The death force then proceeds to take out the students in bizarre and progressively more gruesome ways.
By the time it reaches the teacher character (played by Kristen Cloke - “Space” regular Janssen, guest in the classic “X-Files” ‘In the Field Where I Died’ episode, and a member of the Millennium group to boot), you know she isn’t going to die of a simple gunshot wound. It’s also hard not to chuckle when the silly Billy character is killed by a train (no, I haven’t ruined it for you, he doesn’t get run over by the train itself) moments after declaring he wasn’t going to die.
Overall, I enjoyed “Final Destination” for the teen horror flick it was, which didn’t really take itself too seriously with character names like ‘Clear Waters’! Looking forward to more from the Wong/Morgan duo soon…
***
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!
**
“Was it good?”, a girl outside asked a man coming out of the cinema beside me. “Terrible”, he replied. I didn’t rate it very highly either, and it certainly wasn’t up to the standard of director John Woo’s previous two offerings “Face Off” and “Broken Arrow”.
I haven’t actually seen the first Mission Impossible film but unless it was absolute drivel (doubtful since they made MI2), it proves that the sequel theory (’oh, the second film in a series is always better, look at the Godfather II, Star Trek II, Superman II etc.’) doesn’t always hold true.
The first thing that upset me slightly about the film was that there was no Jim Phelps character (played by Peter Graves on TV and Jon Voight in the first film), it’s a bit like leaving Hannibal out of the A-Team if you know what I mean. Okay, there was an IMF leader or director-type character (played by that other Hannibal, an uncredited Anthony Hopkins), but that lacks the continuity I like to see in film serieses, and as far as I know, Tom Cruise is the only actor to appear in both films (perhaps they are going James Bond style…).
Apart from that, the action scenes were spectacular but slightly spoiled by the fact that we’d seen most of them before in the trailers. Woo also makes plenty use of the “face off” idea with everybody pretending to be somebody else, and if you’re outside the 10 to 70 age bracket it may all be a bit confusing.
I did like the casting of Australian and British actors for characters in the film as it added to the international feel they were going for with segments in Spain and Australia. They also kept the wonderful theme music by Lalo Schifrin, revamped for the noughties by film composer Hans Zimmer.
Slightly drawn out in places [baddie comes back one time too many as usual] but entertaining nonetheless, I’d wait for it on video though.
*1/2
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