For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office                  
for the weekend of September 20-22, 2013: 
                                          
1 (2) Rush [above] (15) **
2 (1) Insidious: Chapter 2 (15) ***
3 (3) White House Down (12A)
4 (4) About Time (12A) **
5 (new) Diana (12A) *
6 (5) Justin and the Knights of Valour (PG)
7 (new) R.I.P.D. (12A)
8 (new) The Call (15) *** 
9 (6) One Direction: This is Us (PG) *
10 (7) We're the Millers (15) 

(source: Guardian.co.uk)

My top five:                                            
1. The Wicker Man
2. Kelly + Victor   
3. Metro Manila 
4. In the Name Of
5. InRealLife 

  
Top Ten DVD rentals: 
                        
1 (new) Star Trek: Into Darkness (12) ***    
2 (new) Mud (12) ***    
3 (5) Olympus Has Fallen (15) ***    
4 (new) Cloud Atlas (15) ****    
5 (new) Iron Man 3 (12) ***    
6 (1) Lincoln (12) ****     
7 (2) This is 40 (15) ***    
8 (4) Zero Dark Thirty (15) ***     
9 (7) Side Effects (15) ***    
10 (8) Life of Pi (12) ***     
   
(source: lovefilm.com)
                 
My top five:                                            
1. Paradise: Love, Faith, Hope
2. Stories We Tell  
3. Populaire  
4. Our Children        
5. Gimme the Loot     
 
       
Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:                                       
1. Point Break (Saturday, five, 9.45pm)
2. The Magnificent Seven (Saturday, five, 5.15pm)
3. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Sunday, five, 3.40pm)
4. The Day The Earth Stood Still (Thursday, C4, 1.20pm)
5. Wonder Boys (Saturday, BBC2, 11.10pm)

"Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers" (The Guardian 27/09/13)

Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers (12A) 89 mins ***

The ten years of audacious heists committed by the shifting network of Balkan jewel thieves known as the Pink Panthers would be a gift for any documentarist with a thriller bent, not least for the astonishing CCTV footage the robbers have generated. Havana Marking’s detailed Panther primer pursues its subject from multiple angles, quizzing reporters, cops and sometime gang members, while carefully marshalled archive frames a deeper sociopolitical inquiry. As one working Serb wonders, if the gang are the folk heroes their propaganda wing frames them as, then why aren’t he and his fellow countrymen swimming in diamonds? Could the Panthers be a flamboyantly acquisitional manifestation of the mob mentality that swept through the Balkans after Communism fell? The casefile remains open, but this considered investigation matches the Panthers’ bravura with an organisational flair of its own. 

Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers now opens in selected cinemas nationwide from October 16, ahead of its DVD release on October 21.

"In the Name Of" (The Guardian 27/09/13)

In the Name Of (15) 102 mins ***

This quiet provocation from the Polish arm of Lars von Trier’s Zentropa Entertainments falls into that conflicted-cleric subgenre encompassing everything from The Thorn Birds to Antonia Bird’s Priest. The tightening dog collar here belongs to Adam (Andrzej Chyra), who – after several muttered-about transfers – has been stranded at a rural retreat for teenage tearaways, where he finds regular woodland runs can’t burn off a growing sense of isolation. Co-writer/director Malgoska Szumowska, improving upon 2011’s Elles, downplays the conflicts in a scenario apparently ripe for torrid melodrama, allowing both story and characters to reveal themselves at their own pace. The gotcha-like ending may prove debatable, but Szumowska refuses to judge her lonely protagonist, instead placing him within a persuasive atmosphere of stifled longing: every lingering magic-hour sunbeam serves as an encouragement to leave the church’s darker spaces behind and come out into the light.

In the Name Of opens in selected cinemas nationwide from today.

"Girl Most Likely" (The Guardian 27/09/13)

Girl Most Likely (12A) 103 mins **

Gulp: Kristen Wiig’s post-Bridesmaids honeymoon may be over. This wobbly romdram/noncom strays into Anistonland, packing the star’s struggling writer off to her dysfunctional family’s New Jersey home, where the rustle of producers’ notes and test-screening cards gradually drowns out anything amusing; pity no-one scribbled down “ditch the mirthless panto with crab costumes”, or “find a less glaringly makeshift ending”. Odd zingers and residual eccentricities (a Whit Stillman cameo, anyone?) stand as traces of the blast it might have been, but this cast surely signed on in anticipation of many more laughs than there are in the final cut. 

Girl Most Likely is in cinemas nationwide.

From the archive: "Om Shanti Om"

Om Shanti Om is, in every sense, the biggest Bollywood picture of 2007, a film in which choreographer-turned-director Farah Khan manages something Hollywood could only achieve if it somehow conceived a project with roles for Tom Cruise, George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Johnny Depp, Cameron Diaz, Kirsten Dunst, Nicole Kidman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Brad Pitt and Al Pacino. (In other words, this is what those Ocean's movies should have been.) It starts from humble beginnings: on the streets of 1970s Bombay, at the very centre of the Hindi film industry, where we find Shah Rukh Khan as Om Prakash, a "junior artist" (i.e. speaking extra) who falls for his ultra-glamorous leading lady Shanti (Deepika Padukone), though their courtship - curtailed by a possessive producer - will head towards tragedy on an operating table. The film's second half - sparked by an early speech Om has insisting there's no such thing as an unhappy ending, just an unfinished picture - begins all over again in 2007, with the star reincarnated as the spoiled moviestar son of an acting legend, who - while filming his latest, silly superhero flick - starts to feel as though he's walking in some very familiar footsteps, and sets about righting the wrongs of the past.

Déjà and vu are Khan's watchwords: the film's a riot of in-jokes, back-references and recreations. The 70s scenes return to the screen not just the dancing girls and courtesans that still adorned Bollywood films around this time, but also the naff chopsocky wherein grown men wrestled with patently stuffed tigers. All of this could be construed as flimsy nostalgia, but the filmmakers have an extraordinary amount of fun playing off the look (and, thanks to Javed Akhtar's A-grade songs, the sound) of 70s Bollywood against its 21st century equivalent. To counter any accusation of cheap shots, no expense has been spared; the credits thank Yash Chopra, and Om Shanti Om shares the veteran filmmaker's ability to put every penny of the production values right up there on screen, whether through lavish costumes, the blue-chip cast or some stunning location work. Chandeliers plummet from the sky like raindrops, while the climax of the first half takes place in a lavish ballroom that registers for approximately five minutes before being burned to the ground.

Khan's beloved status within the industry - as a choreographer on several prominent projects, she's done more than most to make sure no-one looks more foolish than they need to on the dancefloor - pays off in an award ceremony sequence just after the interval where anyone who's anyone in Bollywood circles shows up as themselves for a line of self-mocking dialogue or a dance, but the film also has moments - all connected with fire - where the knowing, postmodern pleasures of pastiche are superceded by pure and thrilling emotion. As the second half essentially replays the events of the first with narrower trousers and a more palatable ending, it's better structured than the majority of Bollywood releases, and the two Khans overcome anything hackneyed or nonsensical in the reincarnation plot with boundless energy and enthusiasm. As an expression of movie love, it's very hard to beat.

(April 2008)

Om Shanti Om screens on Channel 4 tomorrow night at 12.30am.

1,001 Films: "Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?" (1966)

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? now stands as one of the 1960s' creakier culture clashes. Mike Nichols' big-screen version of Edward Albee's vaunted play has two couples convene in a booky nook on a leafy campus for an ill-advised after-hours tipple. The younger pair - boxer-turned-biologist George Segal and his goofy beloved Sandy Dennis - are in the first flushes of youth; the other - Richard Burton's jaded history-department pedant George and Liz Taylor's booze-sodden Martha - have had all hope and expectation knocked out of them, and so joust and bicker, repeatedly and reliably honing in on one another's worst insecurities, as a way of killing the time remaining to them before the grave. They were in the middle of some set-to or other when their guests showed up; it will continue - with polite yet increasingly tipsy interventions from their visitors - until the sun comes up the following morn.

Ernest Lehman's script proves almost mathematical in its seeking out of contrasts and unexpected parallels between the assembled personalities - while also clearly establishing a line of social inquiry (most couples aren't as happy as they outwardly appear) since taken up by dramatists like Raymond Carver, Neil LaBute and Patrick Marber, whose play Closer (same formula, modern dress) Nichols would eventually be drawn towards. As a film, however, Who's Afraid...? is somewhere in the realms of Polanski's insufferable, logic-bludgeoning Yasmina Reza adaptation Carnage: basically four variably unsympathetic people prodding and hammering away at one another with differing degrees of passive-aggression, well past the point at which any sane person in the real world would have made their excuses and left, or drawn the curtains and gone up to bed.

Doing their best to save the project from its own desiccated, talky misanthropy (no wonder these folk turn to drink: it's all just so dry): the then-rookie Nichols, who - working alongside emergent director of photography Haskell Wexler - takes whatever opportunity he can to lubricate the joints between scenes, and the performers gathered together to gripe and grouch under the same roof. As with A Streetcar Named Desire, another "movie classic" that now looks more than ever a filmed play, Who's Afraid...? retains some mitigating value as a historical document, capturing for all eternity an overnight seachange in acting styles: how exciting it must have been for the young Nichols to get the legendary Dick 'n' Liz on the same soundstage as bright young things Segal and Dennis, all impulses and personality with which to counter their older co-stars' compulsive underlining of the script.

Which is not to do the leads a disservice: even if we disregard what, if anything, this choice of project might tell us about their off-screen relations, it stands as the most sustained and convincing celluloid testimony to Burton's gift and genius, the material stuffed full of weighty pronouncements and spry wordflips that play to the actor's verbal strengths; in dispatches, it also reveals Taylor as a more interesting (and less decorous) actress than her later career ever really gave her credit for. Otherwise, for all its star power, for all its Oscar victories, for all that it's been positioned as the dawn of a new and adult age in Hollywood thinking, the film remains something of a slog: all it ultimately has to tell us about the human condition is that people who stay up late drinking can become very tiresome very quickly.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is available on DVD through Warner Home Video.

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office                
for the weekend of September 13-15, 2013: 
                                        
1 (new) Insidious: Chapter 2 (15) ***
2 (new) Rush (15) **
3 (new) White House Down (12A)
4 (1) About Time (12A) **
5 (new) Justin and the Knights of Valour (PG)
6 (3) One Direction: This is Us (PG) *
7 (4) We're the Millers (15)
8 (6) Planes (U)
9 (2) Riddick (15) *
10 (8) Despicable Me 2 (U) ***
 
(source: Guardian.co.uk)

My top five:                                          
1. Kelly + Victor [above]
2. Metro Manila
3. InRealLife
4. The Call
5. The Blueblack Hussar

 
Top Ten DVD rentals: 
                      
1 (new) Star Trek: Into Darkness (12) ***  
2 (new) Mud (12) ***  
3 (5) Olympus Has Fallen (15) ***  
4 (new) Cloud Atlas (15) ****  
5 (new) Iron Man 3 (12) ***  
6 (1) Lincoln (12) ****   
7 (2) This is 40 (15) ***  
8 (4) Zero Dark Thirty (15) ***   
9 (7) Side Effects (15) ***  
10 (8) Life of Pi (12) ***     
 
(source: lovefilm.com)
               
My top five:                                          
1. Stories We Tell
2. Populaire
3. Our Children      
4. Gimme the Loot     
5. Shun Li and the Poet    
 
     
Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:                                     
1. E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (Sunday, ITV1, 4.30pm)
2. Reservoir Dogs (Friday, five, 11pm)
3. The Great Escape (Saturday, five, 5.50pm)
4. Om Shanti Om (Monday, C4, 12.30am)
5. City Slickers (Saturday, ITV1, 10.15pm)

"Diana" (The Scotsman 20/09/13)

Diana (12A) *

Directed by: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Starring: Naomi Watts, Naveen Andrews, Douglas Hodge

Oh dear. The People’s Biopic presumably intended to conjure some Downton-ish opulence, but it’s mired in terminally bland and credulous territory, almost a prequel to that risible Wills-and-Kate TV movie. The misguided startpoint is to reframe Di (Watts, helpless) as a posher Bridget Jones: a bit dizzy – and clueless in the kitchen – but sensitive and yearning, qualities she would take into her covert 1995 fling with Hasnat Khan (Andrews), a worldly heart surgeon straight out of Mills & Boon. Their mutual love of giggling and jazz enables Henri Paul to emerge from the film as quasi-heroic.

The morbid weirdness dissipates early, after which we’re confronted with the year’s direst script, forever prioritising gabbled incident – tiffs with “Buck House”! Landmines! Dodi! – over genuine insight. Banal framing kills off its every simpering or ripe line of dialogue: Khan’s post-coital warning “If you can’t stand the fragrance, don’t go into the garden of love” comes one minute after he’s treated Di to her first Chicken Cottage supper. In a year, enterprising drag acts will be hosting quote-along screenings everywhere. For now, it needs leaving well alone – or do you want a Fergie movie on your conscience?

Diana is in cinemas nationwide.

1,001 Films: "Daisies/Sedmikrásky" (1966)

The various cinematic New Waves, mostly male movements kicking against the pricks and, in doing so, striving to wrench control of the medium and its history, the stories and the girls they wanted, needed its female voices and freer spirits to counter the furrowed-brow seriousness and deflate the puffed-up egos of their young male equivalents. The French had Agnès Varda; the Czechs, for their part, Věra Chytilová. In the latter's film Daisies, two wide-eyed young women - a brunette and a redhead, styled alternately as beach babes, latter-day flappers and fashion models, who could equally pass as a proto-Céline and Julie or sniggering sisters tottering in heels around the Bigg Market - decide that, since the world's gone to pot, they might as well make some mischief. This they will do, in sketches that see them, variously, annoying the patrons of a nightclub, setting fire to their own apartment, and staging a daring raid on a banquet fit (and possibly prepared for) a king.

Representatives of that foolish-old-man class these minxes are seen to lead on and cast aside would doubtless regard their behaviour as that of silly little girlies or stone-cold golddiggers, but Daisies is a film made at the expense of such foolish old men: a loose cross-stitch thrown up the flagpole in anticipation of the feminist movement that would eventually gather around it. Crucially, Chytilová leaves her most trenchantly satirical gestures to the very end, by which point, it's assumed, any greying bureaucrats in the audience would long since have walked out or nodded off: here, finally, we see the pair devouring the banquet, only to find themselves obliged to tidy up, in the manner of "good" girls and housewives everywhere.

You could label (and perhaps dismiss) the approach as kooky or batty - terms the chinstrokers weren't rushing to apply to Breathless or Vivre Sa Vie - yet Daisies remains among the cinema's most purely playful ventures, striving to counter the iron fists of the Soviet Bloc's propaganda arm with a lightness of touch, a free and open hand. Throughout, there's a liberating sense of what could still be done with the medium. Film stocks are mixed up with asynchronous sound; images are diced and spliced together in a visual stream-of-consciousness; it goes off on tangents, changes colour, dips a toe (and a severed head) into the nascent world of movie special effects, generally refusing to sit still and do what anyone would tell it.

The actresses, loose-limbed and eminently game, prove fine physical comedians, and their pratfalls and laughter are oddly infectious: if it is a gag, it's one we're invited to share, however childish, irritating or lacking in structure it might appear - a one-off nose-thumbing or ginger-knocking more than it is a fully reasoned critique. Though it was banned by the humourless Czech authorities for "depicting the wanton", you couldn't really suggest any cuts that might modify it (indeed, it's so ramshackle no-one would likely notice any cuts), and that's the film's genius: in being about nothing very much in particular, it therefore becomes about everything. From its opening credits - cutting together industrial-film images of cogs and gears with footage of an (unspecified) bombing raid - to its final series of explosions and concluding cry of defiance, Daisies forms an act of generalised cinematic disobedience: a prank, a spanner in the works, something the system couldn't entirely classify.

Daisies is available on DVD through Second Run. 

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office              
for the weekend of September 6-8, 2013: 
                                      
1 (new) About Time (12A) **
2 (new) Riddick (15) *
3 (1) One Direction: This is Us (PG) *
4 (3) We're the Millers (15)
5 (2) Elysium (15) ***
6 (5) Planes (U)
7 (4) Pain & Gain (15) ***
8 (9) Despicable Me 2 (U) ***
9 (8) Grown Ups 2 (12A)
10 (10) Monsters University (U) **
 
(source: Guardian.co.uk)

My top five:                                        
1. The Blueblack Hussar
2. Insidious: Chapter 2  
3. 42
4. In a World...
5. Classe Tous Risques
 

Top Ten DVD rentals: 
                    
1 (new) Star Trek: Into Darkness (12) ***
2 (new) Mud (12) ***
3 (5) Olympus Has Fallen (15) ***
4 (new) Cloud Atlas (15) ****
5 (new) Iron Man 3 (12) ***
6 (1) Lincoln (12) **** 
7 (2) This is 40 (15) ***
8 (4) Zero Dark Thirty (15) *** 
9 (7) Side Effects (15) ***
10 (8) Life of Pi (12) ***     

(source: lovefilm.com)
             
My top five:                                        
1. Our Children    
2. Gimme the Loot    
3. The Eye of the Storm
4. Play    
5. Iron Man 3       
 
   
Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:                                   
1. Lethal Weapon [above] (Sunday, five, 11.05pm)
2. Unforgiven (Saturday, five, 10pm)
3. Maverick (Saturday, five, 4.35pm)
4. She's Out Of My League (Friday, BBC1, 11.40pm)
5. Moon (Sunday, BBC2, 10.45pm)