Review: Twilight- Breaking Dawn part 1, Project Nim, The Whistleblower and Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

There are now four films in the Twilight “saga” which means I’ve spent 493 minutes in the Twilight uni­verse, at least 492 of them wish­ing I was some­where else. The latest epis­ode, Breaking Dawn Part 1 fol­lows the Harry Potter strategy of not sep­ar­at­ing uncom­plain­ing fools from their money once when you can do so twice, and thank­fully is the least rot­ten of the four films.

All of the “will they, won’t they” non­sense has been lead­ing to this so – at least nar­rat­ively speak­ing – they are finally get­ting on with it. After the longest wed­ding scene in cinema his­tory – of films that don’t have the word ‘wed­ding’ in the title – Bella (Kristen Stewart) and Edward (Robert Pattinson) head off to a remote Brazilian island to play chess on the beach and con­sumate their relationship.

After three films worth of moon­ing over wheth­er they could even be, ahem, phys­ic­al with each oth­er without Edward los­ing the plot and doing that vam­pire bitey thing, he man­ages to keep him­self mostly in check and turns in a cred­it­able bou­doir per­form­ance. The good news doesn’t last long, how­ever, and it turns out that his madly power­ful vam­pire seed has unex­pec­tedly made poor Bella preg­nant and she is now car­ry­ing some­thing that even know-it-all Carlisle Cullen (Peter Facinelli) hasn’t seen before.

I shouldn’t be so glib I sup­pose. These films are made for fans of the books who have become fans of the films. An open­ing week­end of over $283 mil­lion US bucks is not to be sneezed at and all of these films have proved over and over again to be crit­ic and reviewer-proof. But what am I sup­posed to say? That it doesn’t mat­ter that the writ­ing is dreary, the act­ing is flat, the effects are cheesy and the mes­sage is dubious?

Breaking Dawn at least moves the story on a bit – while still being the shortest of the four films so far – and man­ages to incor­por­ate some know­ing gags into the largely po-faced mater­i­al so there is hope that next year’s final instal­ment might make the long tedi­ous jour­ney worthwhile.

One high point of the Breaking Dawn screen­ing was enjoy­ing the new Titan XC screen at Readings. The new faux-leather seats are very com­fort­able, the drapes and car­pets have all been replaced, there are extra speak­ers dot­ted all around and the tech­nic­al present­a­tion exceeds Readings usu­al high stand­ards. I don’t think Wellingtonians real­ise how lucky we are to have so many high qual­ity cinema exper­i­ences right on our doorstep.

Project Nim is a doc­u­ment­ary about a fam­ous (or notori­ous) exper­i­ment to teach human sign lan­guage to a chim­pan­zee and see what happened next. What fol­lowed that brain­wave was a series of decisions (start­ing with the forced remov­al of baby Nim from his moth­er) that man­age to illu­min­ate cruel human beha­viour rather more than the interi­or life of the chimp.

The Columbia University study was well-documented – by the aca­dem­ics as well as a curi­ous media – so there’s a lot of fas­cin­at­ing mater­i­al for the film­makers to draw on. I’m not as con­vinced by the shad­owy recre­ations that are some­times used to fill in the gaps.

Your cor­res­pond­ent saw Project Nim not long after the excel­lent Rise of the Planet of the Apes which covered sim­il­ar, yet more fant­ast­ic­al, ter­rit­ory. They would make a good double feature.

In Larysa Kondracki’s true story The Whistleblower, Rachel Weisz plays a ded­ic­ated Nebraskan cop who takes on a train­ing and obser­va­tion role in war-torn Kosovo. There she dis­cov­ers that many of her col­leagues (includ­ing UN offi­cials, peace­keep­ers and private con­tract­ors) are com­pli­cit in people-trafficking and pros­ti­tu­tion and that they also have dip­lo­mat­ic immunity.

It’s a shock­ing story and the high-level polit­ic­al man­euv­er­ing and avoid­ance of respons­ib­il­ity seems all too genu­ine. The film itself, for all its sin­cer­ity, doesn’t all work though. Benedict Cumberbatch’s char­ac­ter – a rogueish American officer – threatens to be import­ant but doesn’t go any­where and the con­stantly mov­ing cam­era was more dis­tract­ing than helpful.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan was pro­duced by Rupert Murdoch’s wife Wendi and appar­ently he ordered Fox Searchlight (one of his News Corp com­pan­ies) to release it in the US. So what we appear to have here is a van­ity pro­ject for the wife of an old tyr­ant and the res­ult is almost exactly as ines­sen­tial as that implies.

Based on a nov­el by Lisa See and dir­ec­ted by once-interesting dir­ect­or Wayne Wang, Snow Flower tells the stor­ies of two pairs of female friends and attempts to find par­al­lels between their lives, cen­tur­ies apart. To help make the point the two couples are played by the same act­resses (Gianna Jun and Bingbing Li) and while the restric­tions and con­straints on 19^th cen­tury Chinese women have the poten­tial for drama, the con­tem­por­ary ver­sions come across as whiny – their lack of con­fid­ence in the mostly English con­tem­por­ary dia­logue doesn’t help. The res­ult is tep­id at best and no amount of Hugh Jackman awk­wardly singing and dan­cing can warm it up.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 23 November, 2011.