Review: Jindabyne and more ...

Raymond Carver’s 1981 short story “So Much Water, So Close To Home” has already been adap­ted for two near-masterpieces: a seg­ment of Altman’s awe­some Short Cuts in 1993 and Paul Kelly’s 1989 song “Everything’s Turning To White”. Now we can add the third (and best) item to the list, Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyne.

The story is decept­ively simple. Four guys go on a fish­ing trip and dis­cov­er the body of a murdered girl. Instead of report­ing it they decide to carry on fish­ing. The com­munity is hor­ri­fied and one of the wives (Laura Linney) real­ises that she can nev­er see her hus­band (Gabriel Byrne) in the same way again.

Screenwriter Beatrix Christian takes the already highly-charged story to anoth­er level by mak­ing the dead girl a “black­fella” and Byrne and Linney’s cent­ral couple out­siders, immig­rants from Ireland and America respectively.

But the film isn’t so much about polit­ics or “issues” as it is about char­ac­ter, and there is a rich­ness and depth to every por­trait that we don’t get blessed with too often in the cinema. Jindabyne isn’t an easy watch but it is cer­tainly rewarding.

Crank is an enter­tain­ing action­er with a neat twist and no pre­ten­sions. B‑movie super­star Jason Statham plays anoth­er hard-man with a soft centre. This time he’s hit-man Chev Chelios and he’s on the way out. He’s been poisoned and only ever-increasing amounts of adren­aline can keep him alive while he tracks down his mur­der­er and gets his revenge.

This he man­ages using all the best meth­ods: drugs, sex, fast cars and ultra-violence. The Los Angeles loc­a­tions are well-used, the dir­ec­tion is spicy and the cut­ting is razor-sharp.

The second wave of Christmas cash-ins has arrived and a fairly dis­mal bunch they are. First up is The Nativity Story, a pre­quel to the smash-hit snuff movie The Passion of The Christ. If you’re famil­i­ar with the source mater­i­al you won’t find many sur­prises in this ver­sion which is told with a respect­ful lack of spark or pan­ache. I was slightly dis­ap­poin­ted to find that this ver­sion has no inn-keeper, a role this review­er essayed to great suc­cess upon the London stage as a seven-year-old. Most import­antly: Keisha’s fine, no worries.

Going in with low expect­a­tions is the best way to approach Unaccompanied Minors, the latest vari­ation on the tried and true kids-run-amok genre. This time the not-so-adorable kids are trapped in a snowed-in air­port on Christmas Eve and the wicked air­port man­ager wants to stop them hav­ing a good time. While it’s nowhere near as good as the ori­gin­al mas­ter­piece, Home Alone, I found myself warm­ing to this one and would recom­mend it to any­one want­ing to keep the sev­en to elev­en year olds quiet next Christmas by which time it will be out on DVD.

The most objec­tion­able thing about Deck The Halls isn’t its stu­pid­ity (and it is very stu­pid), it is the stu­pid­ity it assumes of its audi­ence. A not-funny com­edy rendered without wit or sub­tlety (adding a decent dash of ugly in their stead), Danny DeVito and Matthew Broderick play neigh­bours com­pet­ing to be the “the Christmas Guy” in a small town. There were five of us in the cinema at the start and I was the only one still there at the end, curs­ing my professionalism.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 6 December, 2006.