Take the Lead (2006)

Now here's another flick that I was not expecting to be anything special, but which turned out to be a feel-good surprise.  The film is inspired by the life of Pierre Dulaine, played by Antonio Banderas, who was an ex-ballroom dancing champion and the proprietor of an upmarket dance studio in New York.  I'm glad that the word was "inspired", since the fictionalization of his achievement quite probably bears little relationship to reality.  The film tells us that by chance he found himself at an inner city school to follow up a street crime that he witnessed and offers to watch over the very worst i.e. troubleseome students in "detention" after school, since none of the teachers can be bothered to do so.

I always thought that detention was an extra silent study period, but these kids --- a couple of fatties, black, hispanic, oriental, and even one or two whites -- treat it as a hip-hop dance session.  So Banderas determines to teach them ballroom dancing as a metaphor for courtesy and self-belief.  The principal of the school is Alfre Woodard who has photos of former students on the wall of her office -- not those who had achieved any kind of academic honour, but those who were killed during her tenure.  Of course she and her staff believe that Banderas is bound to fail, even if they are struck by his politeness and charming ways, and of course they are all wrong -- or there would be no story.  And having seen the documentary "Mad Hot Ballroom", one now knows that Dulaine's philosophy has spread wide in New York and beyond.

What makes this movie so enjoyable is the growing happiness and acceptance of others amongst these potential misfits and one truly believes that a better future can await them. There is also a wonderful bit of business concerning an insecure deb from the dance school who finds her confidence with the biggest and blackest kid of the lot; when he turns up at her cotillion to lead her in the first waltz, one can't help but smile broadly, especially since one knows that this probably never happened.

Tags: Take the Lead, Antonio Banderas

Knocked Up (2006)

Had I not had tickets for a preview of this movie, I very much doubt that I would have been in any rush to see a flick about a sexy gal who meets a dorky guy at a club, drinks too much, and ends up pregnant after the one-night stand.  Would you?  I understand that this has been a smash hit Stateside, but I am obviously so far outside the zeitgeist that I do not understand what the fuss is about.  In its way it's a pleasant enough film with some occasional good jokes and situations, but it is so over-padded with unnecessary business that its two-hour plus running time is ridiculous for what would have been fine in 90 minutes.

Then again I didn't think that the writer/director Judd Apatow's first big-screen success "The 40-year Old Virgin" was as wonderful as it was cracked up to be.  The couple here are played by busty blonde Katherine Heigl as an up-and-coming TV presenter and by rotund slacker Seth Rogen (not really known to me) who lives with his equally unsavory mates planning a semi-porn website.  When she discovers that she is in the club, I honestly thought that she might seek an abortion rather than involve the obviously unsuitable father-to-be in every stage of her pregnancy.  There was, it is true, a certain sweetness to Rogen's character and one could foresee the eventual happy ending to come, even if it did strain one's credulity.  Heigl lives with her married sister Leslie Mann (the director's wife) and her brother-in-law Paul Ruud and much of the film focuses on the difficulties of their relationship as well.  All four actors had good comic timing and kept things moving, albeit somewhat sluggishly at times.  However I very much doubt that any viewer needed the rather phony-looking explicit shots during the eventual birth scene and I'll be damned if I know why they were included.

Tags: Knocked Up, Judd Apatow

Hollywoodland (2006)

I'm something of a sucker for films that recreate the old days in Hollywood and this movie about the death of a minor actor has much to commend it.  Ben Affleck literally becomes actor George Reeves in this movie -- an actor whose first role was a minor one in "Gone with the Wind" but who then was forced into accepting lesser and lesser parts until his breakthrough as Superman on 50's TV; he became an idol of the children, but so typecast that his original casting in the Monty Cliff role in "From Here to Eternity" was laughed off the screen by preview audiences.  I had always thought that his death was a suicide of despair, but this intriguing movie presents other possibilities.

Affleck does his best work ever here to present the rounded Reeves character and has done his research well, but the role of an actor down on his luck might well have had some resonance for him.  For a man with big dreams, success as the kiddies' hero had to be a let-down, but it was his long affair with the aging wife (Diane Lane) of the MGM studio enforcer (Bob Hoskins) which may have led to his death.  In the course of the movie we are presented with various scenarios, including suicide, as cheapy private eye Louis Simo, played by Adrien Brody, investigates the death, looking for his own 15 minutes in the limelight.  The film cuts between Brody's investigation and the facts of Reeves' life not quite as smoothly as I would have wished, and for my money there was too much Brody altogether.  The true facts of the case remain unknown and this is a far more interesting story -- with excellent period detail -- than the sordid insight into the fictional Simo's own redemption.

Despite this reservation, all four lead actors were fine, and although Affleck's turn was a highpoint of his somewhat wooden career, Lane's was the true standout performance.  She was playing older than her real age and had no vanity at letting us see her character's growing desperation.

Tags: Hollywoodland, Ben Affleck, Diane Lane

Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix (2007)

Of course it is well nigh impossible to take an 870 page book and turn it into one of the shortest films of the series without leaving something out.  No doubt there are a raft of critics ready to moan that their favourite bits are missing, but since no one is going to sit through a completely faithful ten-hour plus version, the viewer must be grateful for this thoroughly successful movie which gives the feeling of the source material without overstretching our tolerance.

This is the book in which the boffins at the Ministry of Magic are doing their utmost to undermine the warnings of Harry and Dumbledore, going so far as to attempt to expel Harry from Hogwarts (unsuccessful) and gradually getting the headmaster replaced by a hideous vision in pink, Imelda Staunton as the horrible Dolores Umbridge.  She not only undermines any sense of fun amongst the students but also eschews any practical training in defending oneself against the dark arts.  It is therefore up to Harry and his closest friends to train secretly and to form the so-called "Dumbledore's Army" before Umbridge discovers what they are doing.  Hers is an enjoyably hateful embodiment of one of the book's most important new characters.

Against this some of the old faithfuls have little to do here, largely because of time restraints, although Gary Oldman as the doomed Sirius Black is impressive.  Of the new characters, I was not overly taken with the mumbling Luna Lovegood, but could see that Helena Bonham Carter was having a whale of a time as the OTT Bellatrix LeStrange of whom there is more to come.  As for the youngsters, I still feel that Daniel Radcliffe is a little stretched as Harry, especially now that things are coming to a serious crunch, but he tries hard, as do his best mates.  Amongst the preparation for this film's showdown with Lord Voldemart we are given some wizard (pardon the pun) special effects which keep the film moving forward.  In many ways this movie is probably one of the best of the series, but far blacker and less joyful and the earlier films. 

Tags: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Imelda Staunton

Viva Villa! (1934)

Nearly twenty years before Marlon Brando gave us Zapata, there was this alternate view of the hero behind the Mexican revolution, Pancho Villa -- an outlaw who took to the hills as a child after murdering the soldier who whipped his father to death.  It's a highly fictionalised version of Mexican history, but pretty enjoyable nevertheless, and Wallace Beery has one of his best roles as the brawny but slightly dim Villa.  Most of the characters Beery played throughout his long and occasionally puzzlingly illustrious career were something of a brute and Villa is no different in conception; yet we have some sympathy for his simple approach to complex problems.  Having helped to establish the presidency for Francisco Manero (in fact it was Villa in the north and Zapata in the south), he is exiled for his banditry.  When Manero is murdered by a turncoat general for attempting to return the land to the peons, Villa takes up arms again and briefly becomes a singularly inept President.  For example his answer to the budgetary crisis is to order millions of worthless notes to be printed without even having the hard currency to pay the printers.

Beery apart, it is a fairly minor cast with only Leo Carillo as his equally stupid and murderous sidekick, Fay Wray (again) as a disappointed aristo, and Joseph Schildkraut as the traitorous general making much of an impression.  An important character is the American reporter that befriends Villa, played not terribly well by Stuart Erwin, who provides the dying Villa with some would-be famous last words; when he says that he will report that the hero did what he did for love of his country and that he should be forgiven his sins, with his last breath Villa asks what he did wrong -- single-minded yet somewhat unaware to the end.

The reporter was originally played by Lee Tracy (apparently a notorious drunk) and the film begun by director Howard Hawks, but after an incident when Tracy purportedly urinated on Mexican soldiers from his hotel balcony, he had to be smuggled back to the States.  Hawks stood by the actor and was also replaced mid-movie by Jack Conway and the change in shooting style is evident.  This was but one of several incidents that dogged the production, but we are still left with an interesting oddity which somehow got Oscar nods as best picture and best script.

Tags: Wallace Beery, Viva Villa!

Dolls (1987)

This film is not to be confused with Takeshi Kitano's wonderful movie of the same name from 2002 which I love, but I also have a soft spot for this cheapy, imaginative film.  The producer Charles Band made an incredible number of low-cost genre films from the 80s onward under his Full Moon production company as producer and occasional director and writer, originally shooting in Italy and later in Romania -- anything to keep the budgets low.  Most of his output is thankfully forgotten, but others like this one do pass the test of time.  Mind you Band had a good trio going here with director Stuart Gordon at the helm and co-producer Brian Yuzna (himself an interesting director before he took himself off to Spain and some pretty awful horrors).

To me there are two things that represent a hidden menace in movies: clowns (scary, scary) and dolls.  What we have here are a recently remarried father reluctantly taking his visiting daugher with him and his new rich and bitchy wife on their summer hols.  When bad weather forces them to ditch their car, they take refuge in a nearby mansion where they encounter their elderly and seemingly kindly hosts, Guy Rolfe and Hilary Mason -- two actors who have a mini-history of horror between them  He was the original Mr. Sardonicus and latter the puppet master and her most memorable role was as the blind psychic in "Don't Look Now".  Another carload joins them in their refuge, a strangely child-like bear of a young man who has given a lift to two punkettes who look like something out of early Madonna material girl and who plan to rob the household.

Anyhow it seems that the old man is a master doll-maker and he is somehow more than this -- as is his wife -- as the dolls come to life to punish any behaviour of which they and their masters disapprove.  They bare their teeth and roll their bloodshot eyes and attack with knives and power tools.  The seemingly bland faces of the dolls can morph with frightening menace and each dead body somehow becomes a new doll -- and there are hundreds in the house!  Only the young girl and the childish man survive, but as they leave another car has broken down outside the mansion with its family of four waiting to be tested.

Tags: Dolls, Charles Band

Corruption (1967)

I occasionally mention my "little list" which is not so little at all; as mentioned on the sidebar, this continues to grow when I read about some film which either I have never seen or just don't know.  I'm always particularly intrigued by movies that people put on their "top 10" lists (which the BFI produces once a decade) where the film in question falls into one of the these two categories.  Then there are the "career gap" films of well-known actors where the movie in question has totally disappeared from view for one reason or another, which includes the flick under consideration today.

Peter Cushing was always considered amongst the finest of British actors, even if his late career was nearly inseparable from some occasionally dubious horror efforts.  I had long wanted to see the above missing film which has only once been shown on British TV -- some 30 years ago -- but which was apparently wildly successful for its director Robert Hartford-Davis.   So when I found that the National Film Theatre had scheduled another one-off showing, I welcomed the opportunity.  Unfortunately it was an abysmal disappointment in every way and the only positive thing I can say is that there is now one less movie on my little list.

Set in the so-called Swinging London of the 60s, Cushing plays a eminent surgeon who is madly in love with photographer's model Sue Lloyd.  The fact that he was then an old-looking 54 to her 26 years doesn't add to the believability factor, especially when he gets into a fistfight with a with-it photographer played by Cheri Blair's dad.  In the course of this a cleeg light falls and burns Lloyd's not particularly gorgeous face and Cushing spends the balance of the film in growingly mad doctor mode as he searchs for the pituitary glands needed to restore her beauty.  It's an old standby horror theme and not particularly well done here; it's certainly no poetic "Eyes without a Face".   As each operation begins to fail, the two main characters become more and more manic and obsessed with finding more supplies, which means that Cushing has to kill and behead more young women.  I understand that more explicit versions exist of the scene where he kills his first prostitute, but I somehow doubt that nudity would be much of an improvement, given the duff nature of both the acting and the dialogue.

Towards the end of the movie the tenor changes when Cushing and Lloyd's holiday house is invaded by four weird punks (as we would call them today) and the film becomes something like "Penthouse", which is my least favourite British movie of all time.  Anyhow Cushing's laser gets switched on and out of control and virtually the entire cast lies dead at the end, which doesn't quite finish the movie as we are again given brief glimpses of the many not particularly wonderful scenes that have come before.  Yes, embarrassment is definitely the right word here.  

Tags: Peter Cushing, Corruption

Recent departures

Well they say these things come in threes, so who's next after the day on day news of the deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni?  I have occasionally mentioned the second of these directors in this journal, as I have been slower filling in my knowledge of his films than Bergman's.  A glance through the archives would probably underline the fact that I have never been much of a fan, although I've admired his artistry.  It's just that too many of his films struck me as long, heavy-going, and often, dare I say, pretentious.  Still it's a sad day when a great artist leaves us.

Against this there was a horribly annoying Thunderer column in the Times today claiming that Bergman was not only overrated but that the writer would be hard-pressed to find anyone who had actually seen a Bergman film.  How very stupid from a purportedly intelligent columnist.  The fact that I have seen nearly all of them doesn't make me a better person -- and no I don't love them all equally -- but I find it hard to credit that any even semi-serious cinephile would not have a passing acquaintance with Bergman's work which includes some real gems.   The writer then went on to tar Lars von Trier with the same "boring" brush and ended by claiming that Bergman's biggest failing was having an influence on Woody Allen which stopped his being "funny".  I despair, especially since I really don't think this column was meant to be humourous; maybe it was just meant to be contentious.

Tags: Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni

Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

This movie arrived on my screen with a lot of baggage.  I knew it was both an award-winner and crowd-pleaser, but I wasn't over-optimistic since none of the cast seemed likely to make my day; but I was wrong, it's a real charmer. We have a family group of six very different characters.  Toni Collette is a mother doing her best to keep her dysfunctional family together.  She is married to Greg Kinnear, a would-be motivational speaker who is unfortunately unable to find his own success.  The other adults in the household are his father, a foul-mouthed, sex-obsessed Alan Arkin who won a best-supporting Oscar for what was a somewhat surprisingly small part, and Collette's newly arrived brother, Steve Carell, a suicidal, gay professor who keeps exclaiming that he is the number one Proust expert in America.  The two children of the family are a 16-year old son by Collette's previous marriage who hates everone and everything and has taken a vow of silence and the couple's daughter, a plain, chubby seven-year old obsessed with beauty pageants, played by the remarkably good Abigail Breslin.

When she has the opportunity to appear as a finalist in the Little Miss Sunshine competition in California, the family have little more than a day and a half to make the long journey from New Mexico in their cheery yellow van with its broken gear box -- a journey filled with incident.  When they finally reach their destination the real fun begins and is at times laugh-out-loud funny.  I wasn't terribly taken with Carell in his breakthrough role as the 40-year old virgin, but he is excellent here, especially when he plays off Kinnear's uptight would-be-something.  The pageant itself is as black a satire as one could hope with the other prepubescent contestants coming across as a group of miniature hookers.  And when young Breslin goes into her highly salacious routine (she was coached by grandpa), the laughs are genuine and warming.  Her gobsmacked family feel the need to join in her joyful act and one loves them for accepting her and being able to shed their own inhibitions. 

Tags: Little Miss Sunshine, Steve Carell

Angel-A (2005)

Luc Besson is something of a one-man film industry in France as an uber-producer and writer; however he has directed relatively few movies himself and this one comes after a six-year gap (his last being a vanity piece for his then-wife.)  And it is very different indeed from the action films for which he is best-known ("Nikita", "Leon", and "The Fifth Element".)  In fact, it's a difficult movie to categorize, being some weird sort of supernatural love story.

On the one hand we have Jamel Debbouze, a scruffy five-foot nothing would-be crim who owes money to just about every bad egg in Paris.  When he contemplates suicide as the only solution to his woes, he meets up with Rie Rasmussen, a six-foot plus stunner in high heels as well, with legs that go on forever.  It is not a spoiler to tell you that she is an angel, assigned to sort out the miserable Debbouze and to make him embrace the feminine and more feeling parts of his being.  However she must first address his financial problems which she appears to do by picking up a stream of men on the dance floor, relieving them of a suitable amount of cash, and taking each out to the toilets for a quickie 'how's-your-father' (or so we and Debbouze are led to believe).  If ever a film deserved the epithet "quirky", this is it.

 

Anyhow Debbouze realises that he is falling in love with this aggressive giantess (she is adept at knocking out with a single blow any enemies encountered) and feels that his future must be with her, even if she, being an angel, already knows what destiny awaits him without her.  One probably could criticise Besson for settling for a conventional happy (?) ending to what had been a singularly unconventional story;  although there is a precedent in the German film "Wings of Desire", it somehow just didn't feel right here.  What I can't take away from Besson is the beautiful look of the film with its crisp black and white cinematography making Paris a third character in this fairytale, looking as glamourous as she ever has.

 

Tags: Luc Besson, Angel-A

Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)

Long before the very recent loose re-make featuring Paris Hilton (I'd love to be able to say "Who she?"), there was the 1953 "House of Wax", which was probably the best of the first wave of 3-D movies and which was Vincent Price's breakthrough as a horror icon.  And before that film there was this relic from the 30s which is a "must view" for any serious horror fan.  I'm told that it was long- believed to be "lost", but I wonder about that since I have had a copy since the early 1980s.  However it is now readily available on DVD as an extra (!) on the Price version of the story, which is rather hilarious when you consider that it is quite possibly the better film.

Directed by Michael Curtiz, a remarkably versatile emigre to Hollywood, it was shot in early two-strip Technicolor which, combined with its art deco sets, gives it a unique look of pale pinks, blues and greys.  The mad sculptor here is played by Lionel Atwill who was later to become Holmes' nemesis Moriarty and the object of his desire to turn into a wax figure is Fay Wray, given every opportunity to practise her screaming before making the original "King Kong".  She is not actually the female lead; that role is taken by Glenda Farrell playing that stalwart 30s' role of snoopy, fast-talking gal-reporter.  This is a movie convention that I've never quite warmed to, but it doesn't really distract too much from this film's horror credentials.  This early version of the creepy tale is not one that makes you want to hide behind the sofa, but it does make you appreciate the many roots of horror as we now know it.  

Tags: Mystery of the Wax Museum, Michael Curtiz, Fay Wray

Transformers (2007)

Some movies are beyond criticism.  If I hadn't had tickets to a preview of this new blockbuster, I probably would not have seen it until it wended its way to satellite TV somewhere down the line.  For goodness sake, who would have believed that I could actually be sucked in by a film based on a commercial range of children's toys.  But then again, who would have thought that a movie based on a Disneyland ride could also be so watchable.  There is something to be said for having an open mind.

Michael Bay, king of the action movie, has done it again and this spectacular rollercoaster ride of a film is almost beyond belief.  Forget about the actual storyline which is complete nonsense from square one -- something about good autobots led by Optimus Prime vs. the bad decepticons led by Megatron, all shape-shifting robots.  The world and humankind are at stake and it all depends upon their locating Shia LaBeouf's great grandfather's eyeglasses!!  What keeps this film moving are the non-stop digital effects as ordinary vehicles and smaller metalware metamorphose into huge fighting machines.  It's a gung-ho effort from the army heroes and the boffins, but it all comes down to Shia's bravery mixed with his teenaged lust for foxy Megan Fox, and he acquits himself well with an appealing sense of humour.  Like I said at the start, some movies are beyond criticism, but this doesn't stop their being an entertaining ride.

Tags: Transformers, Shia LaBoeuf