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Review: Into the Wild, This is England, Once, Bee Movie, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, The White Planet and Hitman

By Cinema and Reviews

In the Summer of 1990 Christopher McCandless donated his life sav­ings to Oxfam and, instead of going to Harvard Law School, headed West in search of him­self, nev­er to talk to his fam­ily again. The jour­ney he took, and what he found and left behind on the way, is the sub­ject of Sean Penn’s crack­ing Into the Wild, based on the book by Jon Krakauer.

Driven by an intel­li­gent young man’s self-righteousness McCandless lived off the land and the gen­er­os­ity of strangers, all the time tak­ing him­self fur­ther away from the people he thought he didn’t need. Emile Hirsch as McCandless has the look (and star qual­ity) of the young Leonardo DiCaprio and the sup­port­ing cast are flaw­less, par­tic­u­larly Catherine Keener and the legendary Hal Holbrook who is just heart­break­ing as lonely wid­ower Ron Franz.

There’s no finer cine­mat­ic sur­vey­or of the cav­ernous and mostly uncharted regions of the male soul than Penn and Into the Wild is his finest achieve­ment to date, lyr­ic­al and beguil­ing. It’s funny how sit­ting in a dark room with strangers can some­times leave you more engaged with the world but this film, the best of the year, did it for me. I came out of the theatre into the cool sum­mer rain and walked home determ­ined to exper­i­ence every drop as if it was the first one.

Margaret Thatcher once said “There’s no such thing as soci­ety.” As a res­ult, under her malevol­ent lead­er­ship English com­munit­ies dis­in­teg­rated as young people without eco­nom­ic or cul­tur­al hope went look­ing for fel­low­ship and found it wherever they could. Set in post-Falklands north­ern England, gif­ted English dir­ect­or Shane Meadows (TwentyFourSeven and A Room for Romeo Brass) is back on top form with This is England, a mem­oir of sorts of his own Nottingham youth.

Picked on and lonely, 11-year-old Shaun is taken under the wing of benign skin­head Woody (Joe Gilgun). When gang lead­er Combo (Stephen Graham) returns from pris­on, his extreme National Front polit­ics splinter the group and Shaun takes the wrong side. Meadows has always been able to get great per­form­ances out of young people and the won­der­ful Thomas Turgoose as Shaun is no exception.

Once is a little gem, like a per­fect short story, sweet and funny and then gone in a heart­beat. Glen Hansard is a broken-hearted Dublin busk­er who meets immig­rant single moth­er Markéta Irglová and bond over a broken vacu­um clean­er. They share a love of music and over an intense week two dam­aged souls help heal each oth­er (and us).

Working our way down the list of the week’s films, in order of qual­ity, we get to Jerry Seinfeld’s Bee Movie. It’s a Dreamworks com­puter anim­ated tale of young Barry (Seinfeld) who, dis­il­lu­sioned with a pro­scribed life­time of end­less work, wants to break out of the hive and see the world. He dis­cov­ers that humans are exploit­ing bees for their honey and decides to right this ter­rible wrong, dis­tort­ing the bal­ance of nature in the pro­cess. It’s a hit and miss affair, at its best when the Seinfeld “voice” is giv­en full reign (which isn’t often enough) but kids watch­ing would prob­ably say the opposite.

Also for young­lings is the live action toy shop fantasy Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium star­ring twinkly Dustin Hoffman as the 200 year old toy impres­ario and shoe wear­er. He wants to leave and hand the shop over to his man­ager, Natalie Portman, but she lacks self-belief and the shop is start­ing to sulk. Derivative and inter­mit­tently inspired, Magorium passes the time eas­ily enough.

I’ll con­fess that I drif­ted off to sleep sev­er­al times dur­ing The White Planet, a doc­u­ment­ary about Arctic wild­life that man­ages to make the Embassy screen feel like a tele­vi­sion set tuned to Animal Planet. I prefer my polar bears clad in armour and tak­ing on bad guys and, frankly, when you’ve seen one nar­whal you’ve seen ’em all.

Candidate for stu­pid­est film of the year, Hitman, is the biggest load of inane rub­bish I’ve wit­nessed in ages. Based on the video game of the same name Hitman, stars Timothy Olyphant (from Die Hard 4.0) as mys­ter­i­ous Agent 47. He’s been dis­avowed by his employ­ers, the secret organ­isa­tion known only as The Organisation (so secret they have their fancy logo plastered all over their laptops) after an assas­sin­a­tion of the Russian Prime Minister goes wrong. Dougray Scott (Perfect Creature) is the Interpol agent who has been track­ing him for three years with no luck, des­pite the fact that 47 has the num­ber 47 tat­tooed as a bar code on the back of his head.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 12 December, 2007.

Notes on screen­ing con­di­tions: Into the Wild screened in Penthouse Two which still has appalling shut­ter tim­ing prob­lems (I’ve men­tioned this before and Cinema One suf­fers sim­il­arly) and now has a notice­able hot spot in the centre of the screen. Penthouse are re-seating Cinema One but I wish they’d fix these prob­lems first. This is England was in Rialto 2 which has had a reprieve through until March, I under­stand. I will dance on the rubble when it finally goes. Once was in the very nice Penthouse Three. Bee Movie screened at Empire 2, and thanks to all the kids was quite lively. Magorium was a Classic Hits radio pre­view early Sunday morn­ing at Readings. The Embassy screen is not a per­fect curve – in fact it is a series of nar­row planes that looks like a para­bola in most cir­cum­stances. This is very notice­able when the image is mostly one bright col­our like the snow and ice of The White Planet (and the sand of Pirates of the Caribbean). Hitman was also at the Embassy and looked and soun­ded fine.

Review: Resident Evil- Extinction, Fracture, Away From Her, Perfect Creature, and Eastern Promises

By Cinema and Reviews

Resident Evil: Extinction posterBack in 1984, Russell Mulcahy made Razorback, the tale of a giant mutant pig ter­ror­ising a small out­back town, and his next film is going to be about a man turned into a koala by an ancient abori­gin­al curse, both of which make Resident Evil 3: Extinction look like Anna Karenina. You don’t need to have seen the pre­vi­ous two Resident Evil films or played the video game (I had­n’t) as the plot is pretty simple: zom­bies = bad; super­mod­els = good; genet­ic engin­eer­ing = very bad (unless you are genet­ic­ally engin­eer­ing super­mod­els which = very good). Stoic action-hero Milla Jovovich is pho­to­graphed using the Chanel fil­ter whenev­er she isn’t sli­cing up the un-dead and the film is enter­tain­ing when there’s action and tedi­ous when there isn’t.

Fracture posterIn Fracture, hot­shot young act­or Ryan Gosling plays a hot­shot young Deputy DA, about to make the leap to a big-time cor­por­ate gig but first he has to con­vict Anthony Hopkins who has just shot his wife in the head. Now, IANAL but Fracture seems pretty shonky from a pro­ced­ur­al and leg­al point of view. Can the LA County court sys­tem really send an attemp­ted mur­der­er to tri­al less than a fort­night after the offence? I doubt it, but that con­densed time-frame is vital for Goslings’ char­ac­ter motiv­a­tion and there­fore the rest of the plot, so best to turn a blind-eye to the detail and focus on two great screen act­ors enjoy­ing themselves.

Away From Her posterFilm of the week by some dis­tance is Away From Her by the sub­limely gif­ted Sarah Polley. In snowy Ontario Julie Christie is Fiona, a woman strug­gling with the onset of Alzheimers Disease. Husband Grant (Gordon Pinsent) seems to be strug­gling even more, how­ever, and when she decides to go in to res­id­en­tial care he feels that, per­haps, he is being pun­ished by her for past transgressions.

Christie is sen­sa­tion­al but the rev­el­a­tion for me is Pinsent, a liv­ing legend in Canada but rarely seen else­where. His is an extraordin­ary per­form­ance, fully invest­ing his char­ac­ter with all of the pain­ful mash of love, loss and guilt that Polley’s elo­quently spare script requires. His raw and con­fused emo­tions are not just etched in his craggy face but into his ever-moistening eyes.

Perfect Creature posterGlenn Standring’s Perfect Creature is a respect­able genre effort, although devoid of much ori­gin­al­ity. In a steampunk-flavoured altern­at­ive real­ity New Zealand, genet­ic­ally engin­eered vam­pires known as Brothers con­trol soci­ety via reli­gion. When one of their order goes berko and starts eat­ing cit­izens, the sup­posedly del­ic­ate bal­ance between the species/races/whatever is threatened. Deputy Brother Silus (Dougray Scott) teams up with the cheekbones of Detective Lilly (Saffron Burrows) to bring the fiend to justice.

Eastern Promises posterOne of the most start­ling career re-inventions of recent times must belong to screen­writer Steven Knight who until 2002 was a TV hack best known for being Jasper Carrott’s chief gag-man and cre­at­or of Who Wants To be a Millionaire? The script for the excel­lent Dirty Pretty Things launched his fea­ture career and he now delves even deep­er in to the seedy under­belly of gang­land London with Eastern Promises, star­ring Viggo Mortensen and Naomi Watts. Watts plays a London hos­pit­al mid­wife and (help­fully) daugh­ter of a Russian. A young girl dies in child­birth on her watch but the diary she was car­ry­ing provides a clue to her iden­tity and leads Watts to the Russian mafia king­pin (Armin Mueller-Stahl), his nut­job son (Vincent Cassell) and the son’s driver (Viggo). Director Cronenberg steers us through the murk effect­ively enough and there’s one thrill­ing set-piece in a turk­ish bath which con­firms his tal­ent for cine­mat­ic viol­ence (if it was ever in doubt). Final irony: the three Russians are played by a German, a Frenchman and a Dane.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 31 October, 2007.

Notes on screen­ing con­di­tions: Away From Her was screened in Penthouse One and the shut­ter tim­ing is still out and get­ting worse. There are also signs of dam­age to the screen (from some­thing behind it?) on the right-hand side. It was also the most uncom­fort­able seat I have sat in this year. This is all a bit of a shame as Penthouse Three (the new one) is per­fectly fine but it looks like stand­ards aren’t being main­tained everywhere.