What films did you see last week? - 28th April-4th May 2008
The new Region 2 DVD of Michaelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte has marvellous picture quality - it looks like it was shot yesterday, which is just as well since the visuals are so important. Surprisingly accessible, it's one of the great films about architecture – not just the architecture of a city in transition but of a relationship in quiet crisis. There's a real attention to the shape of things, with clear, clean lines that people never quite fit in. For much of the film Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau are constantly separated even when sharing the same frame while in some scenes it is hard to tell what is the reflection and what is the real image, consigning characters to a virtual visual limbo, ghosts haunting their own empty lives. And the scene with Moreau dispassionately reading a love letter filled with powerful and passionate emotions that Mastroianni has forgotten he ever had (he doesn’t even remember who wrote the letter) is a killer.
Besides, the film comes highly recommended in the end credits of Monty Python’s Life of Brian ('If you have enjoyed this film, why not go and see La Notte?'), so you know it’s worth it!
Although Gregoire Moulin Contre L'Humanite/Gregoire Moulin Against the World lined up for the proposed American remake, it's hard to see how it could match this little-seen treasure. Starring, directed and co-written by Artus de Penguern, Gregoire Moulin definitely deserves to be better known.
The plot is pretty much lifted from After Hours: a shy and spectacularly unlucky office worker finds himself locked out and goes through a night of hell trying to get the office keys so he can make a date with the ballet teacher he has admired from afar. Minor inconveniences lead to increasingly major disasters until he finds himself pursued across night time Paris by a psychotic taxi driver and his dog, a pair of swingers, a suicidal woman, Adolf Hitler, various cops, football hooligans, and other maniacs in a city in the life-or-death grip of the football cup final (in which many supporting characters appear as players in one subtle touch). As the game intensifies, Moulin's misadventures begin to mirror the play on the field to increasingly bizarre effect, while his beloved's reaction to the copy of Madame Bovary she is trying to read in a bar packed with football fans has its own effect on the game.
Its humour is a mixture of Clouseau, Tati, Chaplin and others, albeit with a darker French spin, and it has moments of real comic genius and some outrageous sight gags that will have you reaching for the rewind button. Sadly, it goes awry in the last reel (and it's a bit disconcerting for non-French audiences to see a comedy end up with a higher body count than 'Straw Dogs'), but it's so much fun along the way, chances are you'll forgive it. It's directed with skill and subtlety, never hitting you over the head with its absurdity, content to place some sight gags in the background. It also has cinema's coolest ever fancy dress party and a couple of truly great moments of choreography - Penguern's brief fantasy ballet with the object of his affection manages to be very funny, incredibly sweet and also superbly danced, all with a completely straight face, while the fancy dress dance number in the end credits is great fun. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEAAvsad0qc)
The Canadian DVD comes with French soundtrack and optional English subtitles, but no extras.
Hallmark’s 2004 miniseries version of King Solomon’s Mines ain’t exactly H. Rider Haggard, but it ain’t exactly bad either. As usual with Hallmark (and all other screen adaptations of the book) it pays only lip service to the novel, keeping the trek and the fabled mines but shoehorning in female love interest (a still beautiful Alison Doody in a role that mercifully avoids the silly screaming woman spraining her ankle clichés that this kind of film usually attracts), but for the most part doesn’t go the Indiana Jones route. It’s a tad more politically correct than the source material, with Allan Quatermain (Patrick Swayze – yes, that’s right, Patrick Swayze) a reluctant Great White Hunter only persuaded to go on one more expedition because he needs money to fight for custody of his son in England. What he’s doing in England is a moot point, since Swayze is more cowboy than Quatermain, but since Roy Marsden and John Standing are the only members of the supporting cast who don’t have to attempt (and fail) to hide their native South African accents behind bad Scottish or Russian ones it’s best to let that slide. It never really hits the highs and round the two hour mark you realise it’s not going to: it maintains a fairly level pace with no appreciable highs or lows. With Russian agents of the Tsar on their trail and World Music on the soundtrack, it’s less a nightmare journey to Hell and back and more a somewhat uneventful leisurely walk through some nice tax-friendly South African scenery with occasional stops for exchanges of badly aimed gunfire until the rootin’ tootin’ sharpshootin’ Quatermain Kid saves the day by fighting a white stuntman in rather obvious blackface makeup and makes it to the rather unimpressively tiny mines in a visibly underbudgeted anticlimax. Never less than, or more than watchable, it’s an okay time filler if you’re in an undemanding mood.
Underfunded, overwritten and often extremely badly acted, Field of Honor aka Benedict Arnold: A Question of Honor has a great story but it constantly shows its roots on the A&E Channel by putting long and florid quotes from the real characters’ historical correspondence into the mouths of actors ill-equipped to deliver them aloud. Kelsey Grammer fares best as George Washington but Aidan Quinn is often hopelessly at sea as Benedict Arnold, a bit of a problem when he’s the main character. It’s an interesting attempt to look at the way the jealousy, snobbery and parsimony of those on his own side led the revolution’s most brilliant and successful soldier to become its most notorious traitor, but cinematographer-turned-director Mikael Solomon fails to bring enough life and vitality to the rushed narrative to disguise the bad writing, low budget and poor casting while the accuracy doesn’t extend to the production design: Valley Forge looks like a gentleman’s summer retreat, Quebec is reduced to a field with a log fence and the American War of Independence something that took place in a few fields and streets in Ireland. Dull stuff.
The extreme limitations of IMAX are all to the fore in the disappointing documentary Wolves: the brief running time ensures that it offers only the most simplistic of primers on its subject while the extreme size and noise of the cameras aimed at animals notoriously wary of man ensures some of the least interesting wolf footage ever shot, while the problems with cutting or moving the camera results in an often static feel completely out of keeping with its subject matter. The brief making of documentary on the DVD generally has better footage caught on tape, though it omits mention of the tame wolves that were hired for the close shots. The clichéd Native American soft-rock fusion score does little to help matters.
The new Region 2 DVD of Michaelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte has marvellous picture quality - it looks like it was shot yesterday, which is just as well since the visuals are so important. Surprisingly accessible, it's one of the great films about architecture – not just the architecture of a city in transition but of a relationship in quiet crisis. There's a real attention to the shape of things, with clear, clean lines that people never quite fit in. For much of the film Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau are constantly separated even when sharing the same frame while in some scenes it is hard to tell what is the reflection and what is the real image, consigning characters to a virtual visual limbo, ghosts haunting their own empty lives. And the scene with Moreau dispassionately reading a love letter filled with powerful and passionate emotions that Mastroianni has forgotten he ever had (he doesn’t even remember who wrote the letter) is a killer.
Besides, the film comes highly recommended in the end credits of Monty Python’s Life of Brian ('If you have enjoyed this film, why not go and see La Notte?'), so you know it’s worth it!
Although Gregoire Moulin Contre L'Humanite/Gregoire Moulin Against the World lined up for the proposed American remake, it's hard to see how it could match this little-seen treasure. Starring, directed and co-written by Artus de Penguern, Gregoire Moulin definitely deserves to be better known.
The plot is pretty much lifted from After Hours: a shy and spectacularly unlucky office worker finds himself locked out and goes through a night of hell trying to get the office keys so he can make a date with the ballet teacher he has admired from afar. Minor inconveniences lead to increasingly major disasters until he finds himself pursued across night time Paris by a psychotic taxi driver and his dog, a pair of swingers, a suicidal woman, Adolf Hitler, various cops, football hooligans, and other maniacs in a city in the life-or-death grip of the football cup final (in which many supporting characters appear as players in one subtle touch). As the game intensifies, Moulin's misadventures begin to mirror the play on the field to increasingly bizarre effect, while his beloved's reaction to the copy of Madame Bovary she is trying to read in a bar packed with football fans has its own effect on the game.
Its humour is a mixture of Clouseau, Tati, Chaplin and others, albeit with a darker French spin, and it has moments of real comic genius and some outrageous sight gags that will have you reaching for the rewind button. Sadly, it goes awry in the last reel (and it's a bit disconcerting for non-French audiences to see a comedy end up with a higher body count than 'Straw Dogs'), but it's so much fun along the way, chances are you'll forgive it. It's directed with skill and subtlety, never hitting you over the head with its absurdity, content to place some sight gags in the background. It also has cinema's coolest ever fancy dress party and a couple of truly great moments of choreography - Penguern's brief fantasy ballet with the object of his affection manages to be very funny, incredibly sweet and also superbly danced, all with a completely straight face, while the fancy dress dance number in the end credits is great fun. (
The Canadian DVD comes with French soundtrack and optional English subtitles, but no extras.
Hallmark’s 2004 miniseries version of King Solomon’s Mines ain’t exactly H. Rider Haggard, but it ain’t exactly bad either. As usual with Hallmark (and all other screen adaptations of the book) it pays only lip service to the novel, keeping the trek and the fabled mines but shoehorning in female love interest (a still beautiful Alison Doody in a role that mercifully avoids the silly screaming woman spraining her ankle clichés that this kind of film usually attracts), but for the most part doesn’t go the Indiana Jones route. It’s a tad more politically correct than the source material, with Allan Quatermain (Patrick Swayze – yes, that’s right, Patrick Swayze) a reluctant Great White Hunter only persuaded to go on one more expedition because he needs money to fight for custody of his son in England. What he’s doing in England is a moot point, since Swayze is more cowboy than Quatermain, but since Roy Marsden and John Standing are the only members of the supporting cast who don’t have to attempt (and fail) to hide their native South African accents behind bad Scottish or Russian ones it’s best to let that slide. It never really hits the highs and round the two hour mark you realise it’s not going to: it maintains a fairly level pace with no appreciable highs or lows. With Russian agents of the Tsar on their trail and World Music on the soundtrack, it’s less a nightmare journey to Hell and back and more a somewhat uneventful leisurely walk through some nice tax-friendly South African scenery with occasional stops for exchanges of badly aimed gunfire until the rootin’ tootin’ sharpshootin’ Quatermain Kid saves the day by fighting a white stuntman in rather obvious blackface makeup and makes it to the rather unimpressively tiny mines in a visibly underbudgeted anticlimax. Never less than, or more than watchable, it’s an okay time filler if you’re in an undemanding mood.
Underfunded, overwritten and often extremely badly acted, Field of Honor aka Benedict Arnold: A Question of Honor has a great story but it constantly shows its roots on the A&E Channel by putting long and florid quotes from the real characters’ historical correspondence into the mouths of actors ill-equipped to deliver them aloud. Kelsey Grammer fares best as George Washington but Aidan Quinn is often hopelessly at sea as Benedict Arnold, a bit of a problem when he’s the main character. It’s an interesting attempt to look at the way the jealousy, snobbery and parsimony of those on his own side led the revolution’s most brilliant and successful soldier to become its most notorious traitor, but cinematographer-turned-director Mikael Solomon fails to bring enough life and vitality to the rushed narrative to disguise the bad writing, low budget and poor casting while the accuracy doesn’t extend to the production design: Valley Forge looks like a gentleman’s summer retreat, Quebec is reduced to a field with a log fence and the American War of Independence something that took place in a few fields and streets in Ireland. Dull stuff.
The extreme limitations of IMAX are all to the fore in the disappointing documentary Wolves: the brief running time ensures that it offers only the most simplistic of primers on its subject while the extreme size and noise of the cameras aimed at animals notoriously wary of man ensures some of the least interesting wolf footage ever shot, while the problems with cutting or moving the camera results in an often static feel completely out of keeping with its subject matter. The brief making of documentary on the DVD generally has better footage caught on tape, though it omits mention of the tame wolves that were hired for the close shots. The clichéd Native American soft-rock fusion score does little to help matters.