Clash of the Titans (The Scotsman 03/04/10)

Clash of the Titans (12A) **
Directed by: Louis Leterrier
Starring: Sam Worthington, Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Gemma Arterton

Fond memories of 1981’s original Clash - a tatty sword-and-sandals romp that set a pre-L.A. Law Harry Hamlin against Ray Harryhausen’s stopmotion creations - should be set aside going into this exceptionally silly remake, which boasts some of the least dynamic 3D yet bolted on to a film in post-production. As humble fisherman Perseus, humbly negotiating whatever the gods throw at him, Avatar beefcake Worthington appears thoroughly ill-at-ease in his miniskirt, but that’s nothing: good god Zeus (Neeson) sports a Bacofoil outfit remaindered from the Glitter Band, while bad god Hades (Fiennes) has been styled somewhere between John Travolta in Battlefield Earth and snooker’s own Willie Thorne.

Best not to question the intelligence of a film that casts Gemma Arterton - Gemma Arterton! - as the Oracle, and which squanders considerable expense and programming man-hours on making itself resemble Hollywood’s biggest flop of 1964. Leterrier’s battle sequences, all apparently shot around the same quarry, would play just as averagely without the stereoscopic specs, while a variably convincing supporting cast (including, erm, Skins’ Nicholas Hoult) don breastplates and venture their best Gerard Butler impersonations. It may just raise a smile, but it’s cheesier than the fondue at a Roman orgy.

Blind undertaking (ST 28/03/10)

The Blind Side (12A) 128 mins **
Nanny McPhee & the Big Bang (U) 110 mins ***
Lion’s Den (15) 113 mins ****

And to think there were those who grumbled Crazy Heart was an unexceptional film to win Jeff Bridges an acting Oscar. This may well have been Sandra Bullock’s year - marital troubles aside - but the galling thing about her triumph in the arrant hicksploitation of The Blind Side is that it’s not meant to be her character’s moment. John Lee Hancock’s true-life drama notionally concerns Michael “Big Mike” Oher (Quinton Aaron), a hulking black teen from the Memphis projects. Left homeless after his father’s death, Oher was adopted by brash, bottle-blonde soccer mom Leigh Anne Tuohy - enter Bullock - who taught him shopping and self-esteem, and transformed him into one of gridiron’s most valuable defensive players.

Judging by its huge commercial success in the States, the film clearly pushes a lot of the right Obama-era buttons. It’s racial, obviously, but religious, too: Oher is enrolled at a good Christian school where the football team goes under the divinely inspired nickname “the Crusaders”. Yet from its blithely sunny evocation of the projects to its last-reel gloss on The Charge of the Light Brigade as a sports coaching manual, The Blind Side is horribly, persistently simplistic. At its most patronising, we could be watching Precious translated from the original black, which perhaps explains why Hancock’s movie has taken five times as much at the box office.

Where Precious positioned its multiply challenged heroine at the centre of its universe, Hancock films Oher as the Tuohys’ latest pet, tagging mutely along behind more immediately readable white folks: not just Leigh Anne, but her down-home husband (country star Tim McGraw, canny casting for the flyover crowd), a kid so brattily precocious you ache for Big Mike to fall on him, and Kathy Bates as a tutor with - oh my lawd - Democratic tendencies. The lowpoint arrives when Mr. Tuohy wonders where Leigh Anne sourced a baby photo for Michael’s graduation festivities. “I scanned it off an Internet site for toddlerwear,” she responds, to audience guffaws; who knew all African-Americans looked alike?

In The Blind Side’s prologue, we’re informed that Oher’s duty as an offensive tackle is to protect his quarterback, the team’s star player and chief wage-earner. Observing what unfolds, it’s hard not to feel the thoughtful, likable newcomer Aaron has been recruited to do much the same thing for Bullock here: provide the semblance of weight that might allow his dainty Caucasian co-star to elude her competition and run all the way to the awards-season endzone. Taken in isolation, Bullock’s performance is ballsy enough; yet it speaks volumes for the parlous state of this actress’s career that a film this retrogressive could be considered in any way a comeback.


2005’s Nanny McPhee was a jolly holiday romp that saw the Hampstead set doing Mary Poppins, giving Emma Thompson an unlikely signature role as the unkempt housekeeper with magical tidying properties. Sequel The Big Bang - which finds the supernatural supernanny refereeing tweenies on soldier’s wife Maggie Gyllenhaal’s farm - applies gooey substances (jam, treacle, pigswill) to the screen with a liberal hand; it’s seemingly hellbent on reproducing the textures of the cinema floor after a matinee screening. Once more, supporting players sign up at their own risk: Maggie Smith mistakes a cowpat for a cushion, while chauffeur Daniel Mays tumbles backwards into a duckpond.

Beneath the gunge, there’s a very English fantasy about the need for order in uncertain times: the WW2 setting cues a Chelsea Pensioners cameo, and some light quivering from the upper lip of Ralph Fiennes as a War Office bigwig. We could quibble about an excess of CG gimmickry - burping jackdaws and flying pigs - but any film that casts Bill Bailey as an amenable farmer must be doing something right, the design work is smashing, while the bomb-disposal finale suggests nothing less than a Lionel Jeffries remake of The Hurt Locker.


If there’s one release this weekend that truly merits Mother and Baby screenings, however, it’s Lion’s Den, the latest from young Argentinian master Pablo Trapero, which sees pregnant heroine Julia (Martina Gusman) sequestered to a prison wing reserved for mothers and mothers-to-be following her abusive boyfriend’s death. Breastfeeding cinemagoers will surely conclude that the considerable task of getting a nipper to sleep in a childproofed suburban semi is as nothing compared to accomplishing same under the institutional lighting of a Buenos Aires jail cell.

Cooler-headed than the recent A Prophet, Lion’s Den operates comfortably within the babes-behind-bars genre - there are, of course, shower-block catfights - but centralising these madonnas allows the film to chart genuinely novel territory: even the resident bad girl has to halt her threats to tend to her wailing newborn. As Julia comes to embrace the possibility of a new beginning, Trapero leaves us with indelible and cheering images: cellblock corridors scattered with Lego bricks and tricycles, snipers clad as Santa Claus, tiny feet converting prison doors into makeshift climbing frames.

Boys behind bars (ST 21/03/10)

I Love You, Phillip Morris (15) 97 mins ***
My Last Five Girlfriends (12A) 87 mins **
The Bounty Hunter (12A) 110 mins *

Can a gay conman ever go straight? I Love You, Phillip Morris, an apparently true story from Bad Santa screenwriters-turned-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, strives to make a folk hero out of one Steven Russell (Jim Carrey), an individual introduced playing the all-American roles of cop, husband and God-fearing churchgoer. Yet as a doozy of a reveal establishes, Russell’s was a double life, involving fake insurance claims and trysts with male lovers. It was while behind bars that Russell fell for the eponymous Morris (Ewan McGregor), although his enthusiastic hymning of inter-convict relations hinted he wasn’t ready to settle down just yet.

Phillip Morris played to awkward silences when I saw it; there are reasons why it arrives unadorned by studio logos, and with stars attached who, at this stage, have no particular reputation to ruin. Still, just as Bad Santa was sincere about nothing save its characters, Ficarra and Requa - coaxing unusually engaged work from their leads - invest this central relationship with heart and good cheer. Steven and Phillip’s first kiss forms the climax to a lyrical montage of stolen cellblock intimacies - and coincides with an especially vocal inmate being tasered offscreen.

The film’s best gag - made explicit after its hero escapes from jail and commences a new career in government healthcare - is that the time Russell has spent in the closet leaves him uniquely equipped to get ahead in business, to pass as one of the boys. “Golf?,” Phillip asks his lover as he prepares to tee off with the company bigwigs, “Why don’t you just eat pussy?” The tensions between the two are all there in this exchange: Russell forever putting himself at risk of exposure, leaving his steadfast partner to grow increasingly resentful in his wake.

Phillip Morris remains a (bi-)curious one: never quite the laugh riot the marketeers have been obliged to sell it as - the flexibility demanded from Carrey is here moral rather than physical - nor the assault on traditional values its scribes’ past work suggested. Rather, it’s a tender, quietly subversive character piece that, in its final round of you-couldn’t-or-wouldn’t-make-it-up revelations, approaches genuinely audacious territory. I’m not so sure the film’s sexual politics aren’t more confused than Ficarra and Requa let on, but it has some novelty as a true gay romance: the wistful offspring of Fargo and Philadelphia, perhaps.


Slim pickings elsewhere this week, although we might usefully take the opportunity to survey the sorry state of heterosexual movie love. Last year’s likable (500) Days of Summer crossed over into highbrow fantasy when its twentysomething hero bought his beloved an unspecified Alain de Botton book. Might it have been de Botton’s Essays in Love, the basis for new British feature My Last Five Girlfriends? The films share more than just their reading habits: like its predecessor, Julian Kemp’s film displays a weird tendency to conceal any true feelings behind a battery of defensive tics and gimmicks.

After an apparent suicide attempt, lovesick hero Duncan (Brendan Patricks) awakens in a limbo known as “Duncanworld” (“The world’s first theme park devoted to a complete nobody!”), where - between wearyingly inventive cutaways and a welcome Johnny Ball cameo - he’s left to ponder a quintet of former conquests, High Fidelity-style. As in (500) Days, the number in the title signals an attempt to impose order on chaotic heartbeats, yet Kemp proves so beholden to love’s torments that he omits any laughter or pleasure. It’s all very well trying to outsmart conventional boy-meets-girl business, but the New Romcom appears to value its brain over any other organs.

My Last Five Girlfriends has more specific flaws besides. Girlfriends two through four barely register as written, and Patricks’ charms stretch perilously thin. (Pick an unknown lead to play a complete nobody, and you run the risk of perfect casting.) Produced on a lowish budget, the film looks respectable - magicking up Paris and palm trees on what were presumably London locations - and never lacks for ideas. But it could badly do with taking lessons from the talking stuffed elephant who briefly interrupts Duncan’s stream of semi-consciousness: “Don’t think. Get on with it.”


Better that, however, than The Bounty Hunter, a dismayingly witless demonstration of Old Romance principles that finds Gerard Butler’s title character gleefully stuffing his ex Jennifer Aniston in his car boot after she fails to make a court appearance. Between bland montages and squandered supporting players, Butler gets to maintain the run of releases that have established him as something else entirely: Hollywood’s first romantic lead to have made aggressive-jerk chauvinism central to his screen persona. As I write, some Burbank exec is doubtless insisting Butler is “such a throwback to the leading men of old”. Yeah, if you mean Captain Caveman.

Hazy Scorsese (ST 14/03/10)

Shutter Island (15) 138 mins ***
Green Zone (15) 115 mins ***

It looked as though Shutter Island, like certain residents of the Boston mental asylum from which it draws its title, might never see daylight. Martin Scorsese’s period potboiler - an adaptation of the Dennis Lehane novel about two U.S. marshals (here, Leonardo diCaprio and Mark Ruffalo) investigating the disappearance of a female childkiller - has had its release postponed more than once. If it now appears to have been thrown away by its distributors in the week of the Bourne team’s more immediately pyrotechnic Green Zone, one can scarcely blame them: the film itself finds Scorsese on decidedly throwaway form.

For Lehane, author of Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone, the stock thriller plot was a vehicle through which to explore prevailing social strictures, and the extremes to which grief can drive a man; for Scorsese, the moviebrat weaned on post-War American cinema, it’s not much more than a compendium of pulpy tropes. DiCaprio’s Teddy Daniels - a recently widowed ex-G.I., one of the first to arrive at the gates of Dachau - has demons of his own to exorcise. The shifty asylum director (Ben Kingsley) confers with his sinister European associate (Max von Sydow). Outside, a storm blows in. Soon everyone’s on lockdown.

Essentially, then, it’s B-movie stuff, driven by the same down-winding sensibility that led Scorsese to follow GoodFellas with Cape Fear; a way - after the Oscar-winning The Departed - for the director to trade on cherished memories of RKO thrillers and Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor. Still, at a bloated 138 minutes, Shutter Island feels less grand than attenuated guignol, its troubled production history visible in the frequent crises of storytelling and filmmaking: hokily amateur back-projections, long scenes of exposition, the facile deployment of concentration-camp trauma as plot device.

Yet - as ever with sub-par Scorsese - it’s eminently watchable, and sometimes better than that. Teddy’s dream sequences are blue-chip expressionism, fitted out with the most suggestive editing, score and camerawork major studio dollars can buy. And if you can get past the daftness, there’s some enjoyment to be derived from the film’s passing parade of lived-in character actors (Elias Koteas, Jackie Earle Haley, Patricia Clarkson) trotting out their twitchy and/or outright crazy routines. Belatedly, Shutter Island comes to merit its release; its tongue, though, remains a prisoner to its own cheek.


What makes Paul Greengrass a very modern director is his fascination with networks of information, how disparate people and agencies are brought together. Greengrass’s characters are individuals trying to make sense of chaotic circumstances, whether protestors coming under fire (Bloody Sunday), or an amnesiac CIA footsoldier attempting to piece his memories into a coherent whole (the Bourne films). It’s no fluke that his latest, Green Zone, should finish up panning over an e-mail address book; one of the key themes in this most plugged-in and switched-on filmmaker’s work is how we communicate.

Greengrass and screenwriter Brian Helgeland have here adapted Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City, a wry non-fiction account of the bungled Iraq occupation. On page after page, Chandrasekaran laid out the bureaucratic snarl-ups, the warnings that went unheeded, the intelligence that proved unreliable. For Greengrass, the story lies in how these truths emerged: Matt Damon’s composite hero-soldier Roy Miller goes off-radar to retrieve a notebook containing crucial data on Saddam loyalists, then has to duck rival intelligence factions to put its contents in the right hands.

A fast-moving flowchart, the film allots scant time to the humanitarian tragedy unfolding in its midst. The Iraqi people are represented by Miller’s translator Freddy (Khalil Abdalla), a one-legged patriot who at least gets to bellow “it is not for you to decide what happens here” at his employers. Yet what becomes increasingly clear is that Helgeland and Greengrass, the born problem-solver who ironed the ambiguities of the United 93 story into a compelling official line, have decided: Miller’s actions fix glitches in the network in a way the occupying forces, regrettably, never managed.

For all the real-world chaos Green Zone hints at, its narrative thrust brings it unexpectedly close to triumphalist fantasy, and while one can admire Greengrass’s typically taut, controlled direction, you might think the situation demanded a messier work, one that didn’t eventually require Damon to stand up and insist “The reasons we go to war always matter!” The film’s intelligence is sound, yet Green Zone is finally too tight, too self-contained an entertainment to do justice to its sources, whether the anecdotal, Arabian Nightmares sprawl of Chandrasekaran’s book, or the disrepair of Iraq as we left it.

Twin Peaks: Definitive Gold Box Edition (Moviemail April 2010)

Cause for cherry pie and another cup of coffee: the emergence of the complete Twin Peaks, one of the most singular and daring projects in American network television, in one handy box set. The second season of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s surreal murder-mystery has long been unavailable on UK DVD due to rights issues almost as tangled as the show’s plotting - but hats off to Universal Playback for persevering: here, at last, is a golden opportunity to explore - or revisit - every nook and cranny of the small screen’s strangest-ever town.

For the uninitiated, these are the investigations of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), summoned to the leafy Northwestern logging hotspot after the body of prom queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) washes up, “wrapped in plastic”, on a nearby shore. Almost everyone - from bigshot hotelier Ben Horne (Richard Beymer) to leather-clad wild one Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) - is acting funny enough to count among the suspects, and Lynch’s hand keeps manifesting itself unexpectedly: in Cooper’s never-more-vivid dreams, the fixation with owls and sweetmeats, and a dragged-up David Duchovny.

The production-troubled Season Two - introducing rogue agent Windom Earle (Kenneth Welsh, terrifying) - has long been underrated; seen again, it offers several of the show’s most lyrical stretches, involving Cooper’s courtship of waitress Annie Blackburne (Heather Graham). Yet it’s the creative risks taken by Lynch and Frost throughout that continue to amaze, their gorgeous leads, astounding tonal shifts and unprecedented atmospherics reclaiming and rejuvenating so many primetime drama clichés. No Twin Peaks, in other words, no Sopranos, no Lost, no Glee.

The extras are, as Coop might say, damn fine, preserving Log Lady Catherine Coulson’s cryptic episode introductions alongside deleted scenes, production documentaries, retrospectives, and the video for one-hit wonder Julee Cruise’s theme song “Falling”: evidence of how the show - and Angelo Badalamenti’s lulling orchestrations - permeated the global consciousness circa 1990. Most cherishable is the inclusion of Lynch’s self-enclosed feature-length pilot, formerly available only on VHS: for newcomers and obsessives alike, it’s a whole other way into (and out of) the woods.

Stuck in a hole (ST 07/03/10)

Alice in Wonderland (PG) 103 mins **
Father of My Children (12A) 110 mins *****

Curiouser and curiouser. For once, the carefully constructed hype surrounding a major studio release has been all but drowned out by backroom squabbling. Disney wanted Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland to make like the Cheshire Cat and vanish from cinemas after mere weeks, the better to seek its true fortune on DVD; multiplex bosses were, understandably, somewhat miffed at this arrangement. As it turns out, the film itself - a gaudy, boring self-indulgence - proves regrettably easy to boycott. I’d wait for the DVD, if I were you; apparently it’ll be along soon enough.

Burton’s Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is a willowy, pallid, perfume-ad blonde fleeing a dullard’s proposal when she tumbles into Wonderland, where the inhabitants are half-CGI and seven-eights British: the Blue Caterpillar boasts Alan Rickman’s languid tones, Helena Bonham Carter is an oddly-proportioned Red Queen, while Matt Lucas essays both Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The Mad Hatter, inevitably, is Jack Sparrow, or Johnny Depp as was, once again concealing his talent behind silly frills and unintelligible gestures: green contact lenses deaden the star’s eyes, while the portions of Jabberwocky he recites form his most coherent contribution.

In 2005’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Dahl’s narrative grounded Burton’s wilder flights of fancy, but here the imagery runs rampant, starts cancelling itself out: each frame fills up with so much pixellated grotesquery that very little of it comes to seem unique. “I’m frightened,” the Mad Hatter admits, trashing his workshop. “It’s terribly crowded in here, and I don’t like it.” One begins to see how the new digital technologies might enable a particularly oppressive form of directorial imagination. For all the additional space 3D gives Burton to play with, the film feels stiff and static when set against the immersive environments of Avatar; it lacks for fresh, non-virtual air.

Burton has spent 25 years at the frontline of the bizarre now, and it may be that a certain staidness has started to creep into his vision. His latest becomes less curious by the minute: when Alice dons warrior-princess armour to face the Jabberwocky, we could be watching one of those dreary Narnia adaptations, while the bathetic coda finds our heroine back in the real world, overseeing her father’s merchant trading activities. She looks independent enough, it’s true, but wouldn’t we prefer our Alices to emerge from the rabbit hole with something more magical to show for themselves than an MBA and an Avril Lavigne single to play over the end credits?


This weekend’s real wonder is Father of My Children, the second feature from erstwhile Cahiers du Cinéma critic Mia Hansen-Løve. Inspired by the life and death of leading European producer Humbert Balsan - the director’s earliest sponsor - this exceptional drama considers the question of what exactly a man can create and nurture, in terms of both cinema and the relationships he forms. It’s a film, accordingly, of two halves. The first - what we might call “The Father” - offers a portrait of Grégoire Canvel (the enormously charismatic Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), mobile phone-juggling head honcho of Paris-based Moon Films.

Grégoire’s life is founded on risk. Pulled over for speeding, he’s obliged to start taking the bus to work, and ends up backing a young fellow traveller’s screenplay. Trouble is, risk requires capital, and debts are mounting like the cigarette butts in Grégoire’s ashtray. Two aspects keep us rooting for this flashest of Harries: the great warmth he displays around his family; and his evident faith in a higher power than the marketplace. Yet his lifestyle is clearly extracting a heavy toll. Grégoire half-jokes to one confidant: “I can always throw myself out of the window.” As it is, his exit is no less sudden and shocking.

The second half - the “Of My Children” part - shifts the focus onto those who loved Grégoire as they try to make sense of what just happened. The producer’s Italian wife Sylvia (Chiara Caselli) picks up her husband’s scattered receipts; their teenage daughter Clémence (Alice de Lencquesaing), a French-Italian co-production, starts seeing the boy on the bus. Hansen-Løve has a rare sense for how cinema brings people together: she makes fascinating the ostensibly tedious business of international co-financing agreements by demonstrating the impact Grégoire’s negotiations have on his own household.

The director’s amatory surname is apt, for her film is steeped in cinephilia; it understands the internal workings and the romantic appeal of the movie business better than almost anything I’ve seen. Yet we come to care as much about Grégoire’s nearest and dearest as we do his pet projects: they were all, ultimately, expressions of his love. Hansen-Løve’s acclaimed 2007 debut Tout est Pardonné never arrived on these shores, but this follow-up succeeds on every level: as a timely reminder money need not be everything, a superbly wise and tender study of a family emerging from crisis, and an act of tribute from a major new talent to an individual whose assets may have frozen, but whose heart never did.

Credibility crunch (ST 28/02/10)

Capitalism: a Love Story (12A) 126 mins ***
Extraordinary Measures (PG) 105 mins **
The Crazies (15) 101 mins ***

There’s a crucial moment early in 1989’s Roger & Me, Michael Moore’s grimly funny essay on the economic devastation General Motors wrought on his hometown of Flint, Michigan. It’s here we learn the filmmaker was fired from a Chicago newspaper for arguing with management; evidently, the fourth estate could contain neither Moore’s concerns nor his ego. Henceforth, Moore’s work would abandon objectivity to pursue its own agenda; even its narration would sound as though recorded too close to the microphone. The baseball-capped crusader wanted our ear, and he was willing to try anything to get it.

In his latest, Capitalism: a Love Story, Moore revisits Flint, and where once industry flourished, there is now not a single green shoot in sight. Evidence suggests it’s the same story all across America. Moore’s explanation - feel free to quibble - goes something like this. The post-War growth, achieved while America’s shellshocked rivals rebuilt, accelerated thanks to huckster-statesmen like Reagan, who gleefully dismantled the system of checks and balances to turn a quicker buck. The shock isn’t that the economy went into meltdown; it’s that the infrastructure didn’t collapse sooner.

Moore-sceptics, brace yourselves. The director gets this historical overview not from an economist, but the cuddly actor Wallace Shawn; he declares capitalism “evil”, oblivious to the fact those queuing for his movie at the multiplex are surely an example of how the free market can, occasionally, operate for enlightenment. Like his conservative opponents, Moore is prone to easy nostalgia, here granting Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights, never enacted into law, a full reading. Still, while it’s tempting to dismiss Moore as a crank, he remains an entertaining crank; if he’s merely a propagandist, he’s becoming increasingly skilled with it.

He recuts Presidential addresses, redubs Robert Powell’s Jesus, illustrates ideas of social mobility with YouTube footage of a dog trying to grab scraps from a table. He relishes the irony of a struggling signmaker whose business was saved by a sudden rush of orders for foreclosure placards. Capitalism is anchored by Moore’s ability to hone in on the most emotive material available to him: planes brought down by debt-burdened pilots, corporations taking out so-called “Dead Peasants” life insurance to profit from their employees’ deaths.

The director has appeared increasingly keen to reclaim some middle ground: even his most divisive work, 2004’s Fahrenheit 9/11, deployed bereaved Republican Lila Lipscomb to bolster its case against the then-incumbent Dubya. One atypically pious segment in Capitalism seems to be reaching out to Bible Belt viewers, by demonstrating how the laws of the market are directly opposed to the word of God. Moore’s prepared to criticise Democrats for backing the rushed-through Republican bailout package, denouncing Obama and Goldman Sachs in the same breath.

What Capitalism lacks, amid this new-found moderation, is any real coup de cinéma. The film is weary around the edges. “I can’t keep doing this any more,” Moore opines in his summation, sounding rather like a Wat Tyler who’s realised the mob behind him is too busy Twittering to confront the issues he’s been raising these past two decades. Perhaps inadvertently, the film poses a question that speaks less of fatcat greed than it does our own failings as consumers. It’s not - as Moore barks at one senator - “where has our money gone?” It is, instead, this: why haven’t we done more to reclaim it?


We follow the money into Extraordinary Measures, an old-fashioned disease-of-the-week procedural based on Geeta Anand’s The Cure; less than extraordinary viewing, all told, but I gave it points for trying. This is the true story of how two men eating tacos in a bar came to save hundreds of children’s lives. One is John Crowley (Brendan Fraser), a marketing exec whose offspring were born with Pompe disease, a terminal form of muscular dystrophy; the other is Dr. Robert Stonehill (Harrison Ford), an under-appreciated research scientist at the University of Nebraska.

The opening CBS Films logo proves the giveaway: this is a TV movie, shot by Starter for Ten’s Tom Vaughan in a determined soft focus, but it’s sincere and decently performed, weighing Fraser’s doughiness against Ford’s flinty grouch. That Stonehill is obliged to become a team player is an indication of the film’s dramatic limitations, and Vaughan struggles to make enzymes compelling. Yet the script is shrewd on the intersection of science and private finance: if its miracle cure comes to seem like a given, the hard slog of finding the funding for these breakthroughs is made honourably clear.


One could harrumph on hearing Breck Eisner, son of Hollywood magnate Michael, has remade George Romero’s countercultural shocker The Crazies. Gone are Romero’s sociopolitical gracenotes: as sheriff Timothy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell’s GP outrun the murderous madness trickling through their small farming community, Eisner’s potshots at military ineptitude are at best perfunctory, and all too clearly aimed at winning the hearts and minds of an anti-authoritarian teenage demographic. Yet the relentless forward momentum occasions some clever-grisly moments. I liked the mortician-gone-wild set-piece requiring Olyphant to desuture a dying priest’s mouth for crucial narrative information. He hears but two words: “Behind… you…”