CINEMA: FILMS REVIEWS
SERIES EDITED BY
MAXIMILLIEN DE LAFAYETTE |
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 Prima
Donna: Minnie Driver in Hope Springs
A romantic comedy; a classic adaptation and a
Scottish road movie - three new British films all have their charms, even
the one featuring Minnie Driver's trademark Prima Donna routine, says
Sukhdev Sandhu.
Hope springs infernal when it comes to films
starring Minnie Driver. All too often she comes across like a spoiled child
bawling her eyes out because she's just dropped a lollipop on the floor, a
flouncy prima donna kicking up a fuss upon learning that she can't have the
restaurant table she wants. How odd, then, that her latest role is in a
romantic comedy, a piece of miscasting on a
par with asking Daniella Westbrook to play Celia Johnson's part in a remake
of Brief Encounter. Hope Springs, directed by Marc Herman, is based on a
novel by Charles Webb, writer of The Graduate, and stars Colin Firth as
Colin Ware, an artist who flees England to go to Hope, Vermont, after he
learns that his fiancée, Vera (Driver), is going to marry someone else. O
lucky man, one might think, but he takes it all very badly and finds solace
in drawing pictures of the local townsfolk.Their eccentricity
extends to their high regard for his sketches, which, like all sketches in
the movies, are comically poor. Ware, though emotionally constipated, finds
that he is doted upon by Mandy, a "trained care-giver" played by Heather
Graham. She likes her whisky, drives pell-mell through the local streets,
and drops her clothes off within a day of meeting him. Not surprisingly, he
begins to feel better. Then Vera rolls into town, turning her nose up at
everybody and everything. Ware is meant to be torn between the two women,
but Driver pouts and preens so melodramatically, it's hard to see why he was
so upset at losing her in the first place. It's not much of a plot, and in
many ways this is not much of a film. The characterization is as skimpy as
Vera's dresses, and the clunky soundtrack features a shockingly bad cover
version of 10cc's I'm Not in Love. Some of the early scenes, especially
those showing Ware freshly arrived in New England, may remind us of Brassed
Off, Herman's superb film about ex-miners in the throes of social and mental
breakdown. Such darkness is fleeting. And yet, despite everything, the film
flickers by painlessly enough. Perhaps it's Ashley Rowe's russet
photography; perhaps it's Colin Firth's pleasing drollery; maybe it's just
the lovely summer shine we've been enjoying these last few weeks - but Hope
Springs is by no means as unwatchable as you might expect. Still, it's not a
patch on I Capture the Castle, an adaptation of a novel by Dodie Smith that
MGM tried and failed to film as long ago as 1943. Set in a near-idyllic
rural past, and populated by fruity-voiced, middle-class people who orate
magisterially about art and attend fancy dinners, it sounds like the kind of
heritage drama that used to be popular in the mid-1980s. However, directed
understatedly by Tim Fywell, scripted beautifully by Heidi Thomas, and
blessed with uniformly excellent performances from its cast, it avoids all
tweeness. Cassandra and Rose Mortmain (Romola Garai and Rose Byrne) live
with their idiosyncratic and bohemian family in a teetering, badly heated
castle in Suffolk. Their father (played by the louche and spiky Bill Nighy)
is a wasted sot, a stick-thin author who has spent 12 years failing to
recapture the brief flicker of genius that was evident in his one and only
novel. His wife, Topaz (Tara Fitzgerald), is unable to goad or inspire him.
Bills pile up and are left unpaid. Eventually, a couple of handsome American
bachelor boys (Henry Thomas and Marc Blucas) arrive, eager to see the estate
they have inherited. They, like us, are quickly smitten by the two sisters,
not knowing that the girls see them as cash cows. Soon, though, Cassandra
and Rose start tussling with each other, the castle itself is neglected, and
the film becomes less bucolic and gamboling, more sad and painful.
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I Capture the Castle is a film
that, albeit topped up with lingering and by no means unwelcome shots of
Tara Fitzgerald dancing naked in the rain, recalls the kind of program
that once upon a time was commonly seen on the BBC on Sunday afternoons.
It has a sense of proportion,
balanced elegantly between levity and melancholy, eloquence and wordiness.
It derives much of its beauty from the rolling, verdant landscapes, but
never loses sight of the fact that it is the characters - their loves and
their squabbles, their fear of bankruptcy both financial and creative -
that matter most. For all its charm, the film is also hard and flinty,
with many tough insights into the necessary selfishness of desire. Like
Dodie Smith's book itself, the character of Stephen (Henry Cavill), a
local family hand who is in love with Cassandra, is somewhat underwritten.
His heart remains an unexplored cave. Still, it's Romola Garai as
Cassandra who steals the film. It seems scarcely believable that this is
her first major role; she captures her character in all its complexity -
her self-conscious naivety, her observational wit, her arty pretension and
her child-like wonder, her selflessness as well as her blossoming sense of
self. Hard it is to decide whether it would be better to be her or to
spend the rest of your life with her. Actors who provoke that kind of
dilemma are rare indeed. The Last Great Wilderness is also set in the
countryside. An erratic but always compelling cross between The Wicker Man
and Lars Von Trier's The Kingdom, it's that rare beast - a Scottish road
movie. It follows anti-hero Charlie (Alastair Mackenzie), who is driving
to Skye to burn down the house of the man who stole his wife, and his
temporary friend, a faux-Spaniard gigolo (Jonathan Phillips), who is on
the run from a couple of gangland heavies who want to cut off his balls.
They arrive at a strange retreat whose motley crew includes a dying
old woman, a fat sex addict and an
ex-churchman with paedophilic urges. The movie, shot on chill-inducing
digital video by director David
Mackenzie, never quite knows what it's doing. Is it a surreal send-up of
Highland lore? A dark redemption tale about the importance of
letting go some of the negative energies
that stop us from truly living? A hipper version of an
avant-garde classic such as Andrew
Kotting's This Filthy Earth? Its own uncertainty keeps us alert and
guessing. Meanwhile, some of the shots are hard to forget: Charlie
trampolining in a forest; a joyful wake in which the retreat crazies walk
across hot coals. Any film scored by the pioneering and ceaselessly
adventurous Scottish band the Pastels has got to be good. And The Last
Great Wilderness is better than good. Funny, grotesque, moving, it's a
genuinely fresh and emphatically independent work from a major new
directorial talent.
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CINEMA:
FILMS TO REMEMBER
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Mystic River
Rating :
Details: 2003, USA,
Drama, cert 15, 137 minutes. Dir: Clint Eastwood.
With:
Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne, Marcia Gay Harden, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins.
Summary:
Self-doubt, ethical compromise and moral ambiguity are on the cards when
three childhood friends are reunited following the murder of one's daughter
Clint Eastwood's latest movie as a
director is a stolid, masculine thriller bearing the lineaments of tragedy -
something classical or even biblical. It's a film where work, good and bad,
is done by men, with women getting to play the tremulous wives or daughters.
Kevin Bacon, Sean Penn and Tim Robbins are childhood buddies from a
blue-collar Boston neighbourhood whose friendship is torn apart by a grisly
crime that happened when they were boys. They grow up and drift apart to
become respectively a cop, a reformed hoodlum, and a moodily difficult
loner, but a new and even more horrible crime intertwines their destinies
once again.-Peter Bradshaw. This is a film with no small opinion of its own
importance as an exposition of real men's emotional lives; its soundtrack
strives for grandeur and there are plenty of giant, overhead shots of the
principals and their hometown, as if from the gods' Olympian viewpoint. Its
muscular conviction often commands assent, especially when it comes to Sean
Penn's very strong performance and Kevin Bacon's no less impressive and
characteristically un-showy contribution. Robbins' twitchy persona, all
drooping shoulders and neurotic glances, is a little harder to take, though
he has one outstanding scene in a police interrogation room. Eastwood's
drama is substantial, but monolithic, like a handsome, well-made piece of
traditional American furniture.
Not many
directors do their best work in their sixties and seventies. But Clint
Eastwood, who has been a major and beneficent force as actor, director and
producer for more than 30 years, has made few better films than the
beautifully crafted Mystic River, directed in his seventy-third year.
Several things set it apart from most of his other movies. The first is that
the setting is working-class Boston. Something of an adversary of the East
Coast establishment, Eastwood prefers the West and the South for his
settings. I can think of only two previous pictures of his that are set in
New York and New England, and both are about outsiders - the Arizona cop
visiting Manhattan to
pick up a fugitive criminal in Coogan's
Bluff and Charlie Parker coming to New York from Kansas City in Bird.
Another thing is that in the majority of his movies the antagonists have
been raging psychopaths. But like the western Unforgiving, which brought him
Oscars for best film and best direction in 1992, there are no born villains
in Mystic River. Everyone is the creation of the community in which they
were reared and the moral struggle their background engendered. The movie is
adapted by Brian Helgeland (who wrote the screenplay for Eastwood's last
picture, Blood Work) from a novel by Dennis Lehane, and it begins in the
late 1970s when three Irish-American schoolboys, Jimmy Markum, Sean Devine
and Dave Boyle, are playing street hockey near their houses. When their ball
goes down a sewer they're distracted by a square of wet cement on the
sidewalk, and the dynamic Jimmy suggests scratching their names in it. He's
first off followed by Sean, but Dave has got only as far as the first two
letters of his name when a
police car pulls up and a plainclothes
detective starts questioning them.
Not many
directors do their best work in their sixties and seventies. But Clint
Eastwood, who has been a major and beneficent force as actor, director and
producer for more than 30 years, has made few better films than the
beautifully crafted Mystic River, directed in his seventy-third year.
Several things set it apart from most of his other movies. The first is that
the setting is working-class Boston.
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Something of an adversary of
the East Coast establishment, Eastwood prefers the West and the South for
his settings. I can think of only two previous pictures of his that are
set in New York and New England, and both are about outsiders - the
Arizona cop visiting Manhattan to pick up a fugitive criminal in Coogan's
Bluff and Charlie Parker coming to New York from Kansas City in Bird.
Another thing is that in the majority of his movies the antagonists have
been raging psychopaths. But like the western Unforgiving, which brought
him Oscars for best film and best direction in 1992, there are no born
villains in Mystic River. Everyone is the creation of the community in
which they were reared and the moral struggle their background engendered.
The movie is adapted by Brian Helgeland (who wrote the screenplay for
Eastwood's last picture, Blood Work) from a novel by Dennis Lehane, and it
begins in the late 1970s when three Irish-American schoolboys, Jimmy
Markum, Sean Devine and Dave Boyle, are playing street hockey near their
houses. When their ball goes down a sewer they're distracted by a square
of wet cement on the sidewalk, and the dynamic Jimmy suggests scratching
their names in it. He's first off followed by Sean, but Dave has got only
as far as the first two letters of his name when a police car pulls up and
a plainclothes detective starts questioning them.
He orders Dave to get into the car to be driven home for
admonishment by his mother. But the cops are in fact sadistic pederasts.
After four days in a cellar, Dave manages to escape from his abductors.
The traumatic experience is as firmly etched on his mind and has become as
ineradicable a part of Jimmy's and Sean's experience as those names
preserved in concrete. This subtle, brilliantly handled opening places the
boys in their social context, and its deliberate pace sets the tone for a
long, dark, detailed, involving movie. Without any announcements about the
passage of time, the film leaps forward to the present with the boys now
in their thirties. Dave (Tim Robbins) is a troubled man, taking casual
jobs, being over-protective of his small son, and having an edgy
relationship with his wife, Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden). Jimmy (Sean Penn)
runs a small convenience store, has a 19-year-old daughter Katie by his
first wife, and two other girls by his second (Laura Linney), one of whom
is about to make her first communion. Sean (Kevin Bacon) has moved away
from the boyhood neighborhood and is a successful homicide cop, though his
obsession with his profession - as is so often the case in movies and
so-called real life - has driven his pregnant wife to move to New York
without leaving an address.
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CINEMA:
FILMS TO REMEMBER
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Then suddenly the trio are drawn together again
when Katie is found brutally murdered in a local park. Sean is assigned to
investigate the killing with his partner Whitey (Laurence Fishburne).
Suspicion gradually falls on the disturbed, guilt-ridden Dave, because that
night he sustained several wounds from a mugger, or so he tells his wife.
The vengeful Jimmy, it transpires, has a
criminal record - having gone to jail for
armed robbery as a teenager - and he turns vigilante, calling on some former
underworld associates to help him track down the murderer. The result is a
cleverly plotted and convincing police procedural thriller. Within its
margins, there's a delightful performance from Eli Wallach as the elderly
owner of a liquor store. But the film is much more than that. It's a complex
exploration of painful relationships between fathers and children, husbands
and wives, brothers and sisters, and old friends. The unfashionably slow
editing style and the concentration on
close-ups and two-shots allow Eastwood to
scrutinize his characters as they are forced to dig into themselves. The
performances have a rare depth, intensity and rawness.
 She's
a Renegade with no Deadline. “Veronica Guerin”
Starring: Cate Blanchett. RATING: 2 Stars
Movies
have always confused journalists with cops, and maybe the comparison isn't
far off: Both jobs appear to be about unraveling mysteries, but both are
really about paperwork. The difference, however, is that cops get shot more
often. Not to belittle those journalists who put their lives on the line
daily, but their movie brethren are a Hollywood fantasy of tough-talking,
street-walking renegades without deadlines. Meet the patron saint of fantasy
journalists: Veronica Guerin, real-life crime columnist for the Sunday
Independent who was shot to death in 1996 for digging too deep into Dublin's
drug trade. As played by Cate Blanchett, she's professionally relentless,
meaning she'll wear black stilettos to get her story or storm into a room of
junkies and announce, "I'm Veronica. Where did you get the gear?" Movie
Guerin also never takes a single note or uses a tape recorder. When she's
shot in the first few minutes -- the movie is one big flashback -- one
wonders if the killers are revenge-seeking fact checkers. The hack coating
that clings to this compelling story is courtesy of director Joel
Schumacher. The man behind Bad Company and the two worst Batmans (yes, he
made the respectable war pic Tigerland, but he'll have to give us several
dozen Tigerlands to make up for Flawless) is a cinematic bully; his greatest
pleasure is to get in his audience's face and roar, filling every possibly
thoughtful moment with a loud noise. Schumacher is faithless; he doesn't
believe moviegoers could care about Veronica Guerin unless those out to get
her are cackling cartoon baddies.
 The
drug-addled city is in the palm of John Gilligan (Gerard McSorley), an
explosive gangster with a fondness for horses. He's surrounded by grunting
leather-jacketed thugs, each indistinguishable from the next. To get to
Gilligan, Guerin uses her favourite source, John Traynor (Ciarán Hinds), a
low-level hood with a hunger for publicity. Their relationship is the most
interesting in the film: each parasitic, each slightly enamoured with the
other.
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Blanchett, who plays Guerin as an overly
sparky plug, doesn't really connect with anyone the way she does this
greasy guy with the bad dye job. Her husband is a shadowy chastiser who
says almost nothing except "be careful." Which begs the question: How
exactly is it different for a woman to play the hero? According to this
film, it's no different; absent mother is just like absent father. But
several moments hint at a more interesting response, and a more
interesting movie: When Guerin's little boy shows her a skateboard at his
birthday party, she asks who gave it to
him. "You and Dad," he says, and Mom looks guilty as hell. If Guerin's
love for her family is so strong, why then does she shrug off police
protection and run headfirst into danger? Because, of course, she's not
really a journalist, she's a movie journalist, which means she's a cop.
Except, of course, she was a real journalist, and therein lies the film's
great offence: phoniness. Inadvertently (one hopes) Schumacher paints
Guerin as irresponsible -- not just a martyr, but a selfish rogue who
abandons her family. It's hard to imagine Daniel Pearl getting the same
treatment in his crusading journalist biopic.
 Intolerable
Cruelty. Rating:
Directed by: Joel Coen.
Starring: George Clooney; Catherine Zeta-Jones
It is traditional, when
considering the films of the Coen brothers, to remark on their
versatility, and their ability to pastiche and corrupt genres, while also
remaining true to their chosen form. There is some truth in this notion,
but, as a means of understanding their output, it is increasingly
unhelpful. The Coens’ films - of which Joel is the listed director, and
Ethan a screenwriter - are more easily seen as reflections of a cinematic
imagination. They have an old-fashioned belief in the importance of
character, and a playful interest in storytelling, and both qualities are
rendered with an imagination informed by B-movies and
pulp fiction. Their work is not just an
academic trawl through genre: from thriller to police procedural to - ahem
- bowling opera and depression-era Homeric chain gang comedy. This does
not make them realists, and Intolerable Cruelty takes their work to a new
level of whimsy.
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CINEMA:
FILMS TO REMEMBER
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That it
succeeds is largely due to the performance of George Clooney, a leading man
who now has the confidence to mock the notion of leading men. Clooney is
Miles Massey, a grinning lawyer who specializes in expensive divorces, but
who is also in the midst of a
mid-life crisis which he is reluctant to
acknowledge. He defines life as "struggle and challenge and the destruction
of your opponent" and considers marriage to be a concept in which
obsolescence is inbuilt: "Time marches on. Ardor cools." He is also a
workaholic. In his first scene, he is at the dentist, talking turkey through
a rubber gum dam, and there are several scenes in which he checks the
brilliance of his smile. Clooney seems to be wearing prosthetic teeth for
the part, which is a comic parody of Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko, and even
includes a keynote speech spoofing Gekko’s "greed is good" mantra, in which
Massey asserts that "love is good". (The speech is to the National
Organization of Matrimonial Attorneys Nationwide, whose slogan is "let NOMAN
put asunder".) There is, then, a degree of ironic pleasure to be taken from
the fact that the love interest is supplied by Catherine Zeta-Jones, wife of
Michael Douglas, who played Gekko. While Douglas gave a performance full of
such oily intensity that it was hard to locate the irony, Clooney does
something better, playing an insincere, unprincipled fool, who remains
breezily likeable. On ER, Clooney didn’t act so much as mug intensely. His
repertoire was a smoulder, a shrug, and a curious neck-crick to signal
emotional discomfiture. Now, he has perfected the chemistry in which the
swagger, the voice, and the Brylcreem combine to make a winning parody of a
hero. He has a nice way of narrowing his eyes. He cleans his teeth squeakily
with his finger. His timing is spot-on: see the scene where he encounters a
breathless assassin, and asks: "Are you ... Wheezy Joe?" (The pause being
filled by the assassin’s labored attempts to commune with his lungs). As the
money-grubbing vamp, Marylin Rexroth, Zeta-Jones is a cosmetic success.
Normally an offensive screen presence, she manages here to evince a dreamy
flirtatiousness, without quite becoming a Dynasty villainess. She smoulders
well, which is enough, as smouldering is her main purpose. Another actor on
the verge of self-parody, Billy Bob Thornton, does well as the idiot oilman,
Howard D Doyle of Doyle Oil, who is tricked into marrying Marylin. Geoffrey
Rush, as cuckolded TV producer Donovan Donaly, is less endearing, though
there is a moment of satisfaction when he is attacked with his daytime
television lifetime achievement award. The most subtle performance comes
from Miles’s sidekick Wrigley (Paul Adelstein), while Jonathan Hadary is
winningly overstated as Heinz, the Baron Kraus von Espy, a fop with a fluffy
dog. At the start of their career, the Coens had trouble bringing warmth to
their films. Intolerable Cruelty finds them at their most accessible, but,
as a
love story which celebrates divorce, it is
not without its subtleties. It is also a film of great, inexplicable scenes
- Clooney in a kilt; a psychotic waitress taking umbrage at an order for
baby fried greens - and witty detail (note Clooney’s face as he peruses a
copy of Living Without Intestines magazine). As befits a film in which one
of the biggest laughs comes from a guitar-playing minister, off screen,
singing the opening line of Simon and Garfunkel’s Punky’s Dilemma, the tone
is more oddball than screwball, with the comedy coming from a place slightly
to the right of left field. "Wish I was a Kellogg’s Cornflake," the minister
sings, "Floatin’ in my bowl takin’ movies." He talks, I think, for the Coen
brothers. He may even be sincere.-Aleistar MacKay
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Time of the Wolf
 Details:
2003, France/Rest of the world, Drama,
cert 15, 110 mins, Dir: Michael Haneke.
With: Anais Demoustier, Beatrice Dalle,
Daniel Duval, Hakim Taleb, Isabelle Huppert,
Lucas Biscombe, Patrice Chereau. Summary:
A couple and their two children flee the city for their country home, only
to find it occupied by strangers.
The central image of the 1921 film Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, its
origins in the Bible and medieval iconography, put before the public a
vision of a world on the brink of total destruction. Perhaps the first
film to show our civilization reduced to ashes was Things to Come in 1936
which prophesied a Second World War resulting in
total annihilation. Since Hiroshima,
however, the post-apocalyptic movie has become a worldwide
sci-fi genre, ranging in Australia alone
from the pious solemnities of On the Beach to the
comic-strip rumbustiousness of the Mad
Max flicks. Directed by the gifted but earnest Austrian Michael Haneke,
Time of the Wolf is art-house apocalypse, a somber, self-important picture
that begins and ends without reaching any climax or resolution. After some
unexplained catastrophe that has led to a total social breakdown in an
unidentified country, a middle-class family consisting of a strong-willed
father, his wife Anne (Isabelle Huppert), a teenage daughter Eva and a
10-year-old son Ben, arrive by car at their country cottage to discover it
occupied by an armed stranger, his wife and children. After some tense
talk about what provisions the visitors have, the father is suddenly
killed by the intruder. After this shocking start, Anne and the children
flee with a bike and the clothes they stand up in.
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MOVIES AND
TELEVISION
From the Desk of Maximillien de Lafayette and Esther Rutherfold
The mystique of Yoda
Photo:
Characters from the "Star Wars" films join writer and director
George Lucas, center left, Carrie Fisher, center, and Mark Hamill at the
world premiere of "Star Wars Special Edition" in 1997, in the Westwood
section of Los Angeles. Chewbacca is at top left with robots C-3PO,
foreground left, and R2-D2. Photo credits: Rene Macurra.
When
it comes to Star Wars, maybe there's too much gravity in space. Fans
invariably take Star Wars too seriously, but the people behind the
sci-fi series recall the experience as a
surreal comic opera. Training a monkey to play Yoda? Studio complaints that
Chewbacca was pantsless? The only thing that worked on R2-D2 was the dwarf
inside? As the original trilogy arrived on DVD for the first time Tuesday,
the madcap tales told by those who lovingly toiled on Star Wars, The Empire
Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi demystify three of the most revered
sci-fi films of all time. Not that kind of
movie: Some films can be endlessly dissected and debated. But Luke Skywalker
himself says Star Wars was just meant to be fun. Twenty-seven years after
the first movie debuted, actor Mark Hamill said he is amused by all the
fact-checking fans do. One recent Web site shocked him. "I think it was
speculating on the administrative cost of the janitorial staff of the Death
Star, taking this hard-edged reality to something that's fantasy," Hamill
joked. "But I was that way myself. I remember saying things like, 'Well,
wait a minute. I just got out of the trash compactor. How come my hair's all
perfect?' And Harrison (Ford) would go, 'Hey kid. . .it ain't that kind of
movie."
Star Wars
Scores
George Lucas won't need to use the Force anymore after the DVD release of
the Star Wars Trilogy scored big
around the world this week, bringing him
more dosh than he could possibly imagine. The original movies - released for
the first time on DVD in a trilogy box set - were unveiled alongside
LucasArts's videogame Star Wars: Battlefront on Monday. By Tuesday, the two
titles had taken a quite unprecedented $115 million dollars in worldwide
sales. And that's before the double whammy's been released in Australia,
Japan and Mexico. Industry watchers say such impressive early sales reports
will undoubtedly mean that the Star Wars cash cow ranks as one of the
bestselling DVDs of the year and as one of the top 15 DVDs of all time. Way
to go, George.
Collateral (2004).
Reviewer's Rating
User Rating
Killing people is what Vincent (Tom Cruise) does for
a living. And in Collateral, he's working overtime. An assassin on a
flying visit to Los Angeles, he forces a cabbie called Max (Jamie Foxx)
to drive him from hit to hit. The pair play out a battle of wills and
wits; the go-getting cold-blooded killer and all-talk everyman
influencing each other as the bodies pile up, in this slick, stylish
thriller from
Heat director Michael Mann.
The beautifully-shot LA we see
here is a dark, dangerous, compelling place - tinged with every hue of
grey and blue, matching the prowling presence of its star. Cruise, hair
flecked grey, is obviously meant to be wolfish, but his character is
perhaps closest to a Great White Shark: killing is nothing personal,
it's just what he does.
"FUNNY WITHOUT BEING FLIPPANT"
"You killed him!" exclaims Max
over a body once the
first job goes down. "No, I shot him,"
is Vincent's rational reply. "The bullets and the fall killed him." It's
a great dark laugh - one of several in Stuart Beattie's script, which
manages to be funny without being flippant, giving Vincent wicked
one-liners without turning him to a
cartoon. For despite (or perhaps because of) its high concept conceit
(being cabbie to a killer), Collateral could easily have been just
another
action movie. Here, though, there are
ideas, even if the survival-of-the-fittest, do-or-die theme is
eventually rather one note. It isn't the only thing that's obvious, with
the amusing, exceptional first half undermined a touch when things Get
Serious and race towards the expertly executed - but somewhat mechanical
- Tom as The Terminator conclusion. Still, for Vincent's sharp-witted
command of the cab and the echoes of The Third Man and Heat, Collateral
is well worth targeting. CREDITS: Director: Michael Mann. Writer: Stuart
Beattie. Stars: Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx, Jada Pinkett Smith, Mark Ruffalo
and Peter Berg. Genre: Thriller. Length: 120 minutes. Release: September
17, 2004. Country: USA.-Neeve Reeves.
CLUBHOUSE
The new series Clubhouse --
about a teenager who's a bat boy for a major league team -- may use sports as
a metaphor for life, but
the producers know the action on the field
still has to look authentic. That was fairly easy to pull off in the pilot, in
which Dodger Stadium served as the stand-in for the fictional New York
Empires' ballpark. But subsequent episodes have to rely on a home plate
constructed on a turntable on a studio set, occasional trips to a small
college field and computer-generated graphics. Executive producer Ken Topolsky
slips a tape into the video machine in his office. It illustrates how at-bat
footage, shot with a few actors against a green screen, can be digitally
enhanced to place cheering -- or booing -- crowds in the stands. Daniel Cerone,
the show's head writer and another executive producer, concedes there were "a
lot of sleepless nights" in the weeks before they saw how well such
virtual reality worked. "The technology is
just at the point where
special effects are not being used so much to
do the extraordinary but the ordinary," Cerone says. "I would argue that this
series, even three years ago, couldn't have been done without actually going
to a regular ballpark and filling it with thousands of extras," a financial
and logistical improbability for a TV series. "If an audience doesn't believe
the baseball, they don't believe the world. And if they don't believe the
world, they don't believe the characters. And if they don't believe the
characters, they don't care," says Topolsky, whose previous credits include
the coming-of-age series The Wonder Years and Party of Five. Clubhouse, from
Aaron Spelling's production company, premieres on Sunday, then moves to its
regular Tuesday time slot on Sept. 28. Dean Cain (Clark Kent in Lois and
Clark: The New Adventures Superman) plays Conrad Dean, the Empires' slick
superstar. Christopher Lloyd, who won two Emmys for his role on Taxi, is Lou
Russo, the irascible equipment manager. Jeremy Sumpter, who played the title
role in last year's feature film Peter Pan, is the bat boy, Pete Young. Mare
Winningham is his mother, Lynne, who has raised Pete and his sister alone
since their father left years ago. Sumpter's face still retains its lost-boy
sweetness, though he has grown a tad since he flew around with Wendy and
Tinkerbell. "He's just a kid who loves baseball, was introduced to it by his
father," the 15-year-old actor says of his character. "And baseball is what
keeps alive for Pete memories of his dad. Baseball is Pete's dad basically."
Despite such layering, the producers insist the show isn't an overly
sentimental peek behind the scenes of the professional game, but neither is it
a sensationalized expose. "We are not Playmakers. We don't want to be
Playmakers," says Cerone, referring to the short-lived drama series about the
seamier aspects of
pro football. "But on the other hand we do
want to show the baseball world as it exists," says Cerone. In the pilot
episode, steroid use is a major plot point. In another episode, there are
cigars, porn magazines and beer in the clubhouse where the batboys are
unsupervised. "We are just presenting a reality. But the flip side is that in
each episode we are a focusing on the boy's character and . . . that there are
consequences to actions," says Cerone. -Bridget Byrn.
The millionaires
fight
In the battle of rich guys
turned TV stars, Donald Trump has it all over Mark Cuban. Trump drew just
under 16 million viewers to NBC last week for the second instalment of The
Apprentice 2, according to Nielsen Media Research. While the series is
starting slowly this time around, it's not nearly as slow as Cuban's The
Benefactor. The colourful Dallas Mavericks owner is giving away money on a new
ABC reality show, and its debut reached 5.5 million people, Nielsen said. A
rerun the following night had fewer than three million viewers. During the
week before the official opening of the fall season, the most popular program
was -- appropriately enough -- a rerun. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation had
22.3 million viewers. Two of television's signature events -- the Emmy Awards
and the Miss America pageant -- both fell out of Nielsen's top 10. The Emmys
were seen by only 13.8 million people on ABC Sunday, the second smallest
audience ever for TV's award night. Miss America was seen by 9.8 million
people, its smallest audience ever. CBS won the week with an average of 10.9
million viewers (7.2 rating, 12 share). NBC had 9.9 million (6.6, 11), and won
among the 18-to-49-year-old demographic advertisers love. Monday Night
Football pushed ABC's average to 8.8 million (6.1, 10), slumping Fox had 4.8
million (3.1, 5), the WB 3.7 million (2.4, 4), UPN 2.8 million (1.9, 3) and
Pax TV 680,000 (0.5, 1). A ratings point represents 1,096,000 households, or
one per cent of the nation's estimated 109.6 million TV homes. The share is
the percentage of in-use televisions tuned to a given show. For the week of
Sept. 13-19, the top 10 shows, their networks and viewerships: CSI: Crime
Scene Investigation, CBS, 22.3 million; Survivor: Vanuatu, CBS, 20.1 million;
NFL Monday Night Football: Green Bay at Carolina, ABC, 18.8 million; Will &
Grace, NBC, 16.5 million; Without a Trace, CBS, 16.1 million; 60 Minutes, CBS,
16 million; The Apprentice 2, NBC, 15.9 million; Joey, NBC, 15.4 million; NFL
Monday Showcase, ABC, 15.3 million; Siegfried & Roy: Miracle, NBC, 14.5
million.-David Bader.
The
Dead Walk (Again)
After years of false starts, broken promises and missed opportunities, the
dead are back from the grave: George A Romero is gearing up to start shooting
the fourth film in his zombie, "trilogy" of Night, Dawn, and Day of the Dead.
The latest film, entitled Land of the Dead, is set years after the zombie
apocalypse and follows a small band of survivors holed up inside a walled
outpost. With Universal set to distribute and production scheduled to start
shooting in Toronto on 11 October, it seems you can't keep a good zombie
filmmaker down.
Fade Out/Fade In
Zombie lover Milla Jovovich (Resident Evil) is leaving the ghouls behind and
stepping into the shoes of Brit actress Kate Beckinsale for Fade Out, a
Hitchcockian psycho thriller. She'll be starring alongside Billy Bob Thornton
as the wife of a man who's undergoing a mental breakdown. Convinced that his
spouse is cheating on him, Billy Bob begins to write a screenplay about their
relationship but then loses all sense of where real life ends and fiction
begins. Jovovich nabbed the role after Beckinsale dropped out due to
scheduling conflicts. It all sounds very intriguing - assuming you haven't
already seen the Johnny Depp/Maria Bello nut job writer tale, Secret Window.
No
More War
Anti-war director David O Russell (Three Kings) has finally solved the
problem of how to get people to see his 35-minute documentary about the war in
Iraq. As previously reported in High Noon, Russell's film was supposed to be
an extra on the Three Kings Special Edition DVD, but was ditched after Warner
Bros. realised quite what an incendiary piece of filmmaking it was. Now the
leftfield doc about the effect of the war on those on the front line -
entitled Soldiers' Pay - is going to be released in the US on a double bill
with Robert Greenwald's investigative film Uncovered: The War In Iraq. A joint
DVD release for both movies is also being planned for the near future.
Uncovered: The War In Iraq opens (sadly on its own) in the UK on 29th October.
No More Meyer
Veteran cult filmmaker Russ Meyer has died at his Hollywood home at the age of
82. The controversial adult director, whose mammary-fixated movies Faster,
Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls and Beneath The Valley
Of The Ultra Vixens brought him both applause and condemnation, had been
suffering from dementia and pneumonia. Famed for unleashing a bevy of
bra-busting buxom actresses on the world, Meyer's erotic but far from graphic
films have gone down in cult cinema history as the movies that helped
kick-start the modern pornography industry.-Jamie Rusell.
The
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
