Paul Verhoeven is best known for blockbusters like Total Recall, Starship Troopers and Basic Instinct, but not perhaps for moving drama. In Zwartboek he takes his mastery of glossy suspense and action and combines this with a genuinely affecting story to produce a grown-up film that crosses genres. This is a dazzling rollercoaster of a thriller, producing a complex vision of a complex time in European history.
Set in Holland in the final months of the Second World War, the story focuses on Jewish singer Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten) when she is forced to flee her hiding place. After her family is brutally murdered in front of her, she joins the Dutch Resistance and goes deep undercover in the occupiers’ headquarters. What follows is a labyrinth plot with many twists and turns. It is an unusual film because it sometimes has the feel of a Hollywood thriller, yet is in Dutch and German. It has moments of shocking violence, but also many deeply emotional and poignant scenes. It is also unusual for producing a very morally complex story. No-one is shown as wholly good or evil as an empire crumbles, and peace holds as many problems as the war. Verhoeven even produces that rarest of things, a sympathetic Nazi; Müntze (Sebastian Koch) is a lonely man who has also suffered, and his relationship with Rachel really is the film’s suprising heart.
The world Verhoeven has created is fully realised. The sets and costumes range from grimy and squalid to lush and luxurious, always looking exactly right. It is not surprising to learn that this is the most expensive Dutch film ever made. But the best thing about this film is undoubtably van Houten, who creates a wonderful heroine. Carice van Houten looks like a grown-up Kirsten Dunst, if Kirsten Dunst could act. She is radient in the party scenes, wearing stunning red satin as she partakes in caberet and espionage. Films often purport to have strong female characters, but they end up like something from a computer game, all high-kicking karate and tight jumpsuits. Rachel, unhampered by American cinema’s backwards view of feminism, is a truly brave and intelligent woman who thinks on her feet and is fighting for what is right. She uses her sexuality to her advantage and is always in complete control, even in the most tragic circumstances.
My only criticism would be that the story is told as a flashback, meaning that we already partly know the outcome of events. Leaving the ending a mystery would have kept the audience even more on the edge their seat. No matter, for this is still an extremely exhilerating ride through Europe at its darkest moment, full of double-crossing, intrigue, and love.
Tuesday 27 February 2007
Review - Bobby
Emilio Estevez’s film is obviously a labour of love on the part of the director, a peaen to the time when everything seemed possible for America, and a haunting account of the moment when all hope disappeared. The historical background to events, and their significance to today, is hammered home effectively; you only wish that he’d been able to wrap it around a better film.
The action takes place on that fateful day of June 4th 1968, and in the fateful place of the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles. We follow a large selection of characters pulled from the staff and guests of the hotel in the run up to the senseless killing of Robert Kennedy. They are carefully selected to tick all the issue-boxes of the period, so we get ethnic tensions in the kitchen, emerging feminism in the bedroom, and anti-war sentiment in the wedding chapel. And of course the obligatory hippy. This is a portrait of a group of people in pain, a network of hurting individuals that we are supposed to get involved with; the musical interlude (to the excellent ‘Never Gonna Break My Faith’ by Aretha Franklin and Mary J. Blige, the only new song in a great contemporaneous soundtrack) evokes P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia, an altogether more effective member of this genre.
The starry cast produces great performances, but they are let down by a lack of focus and memorable dialogue. There doesn’t seem to any point to it all. It is never made clear who Martin Sheen and Helen Hunt’s couple are or why they are there (it’s certainly not to entertain or move you). Demi Moore’s alcoholic singer is very miserable, and that’s her whole story. Estevez gives himself a part as her husband, the role consisting only of walking a small dog in a daze.
Of the myriad storylines, there are some that work: the love triangle surrounding William H. Macy, with Sharon Stone’s world-weary wife and a deliciously doe-eyed Heather Graham as the Other Woman, is sensitively portrayed. Anthony Hopkins gives a lovingly gentle and naturalistic performance as a retired doorman who can’t bear to leave the hotel, and Freddy Rodriquez is adorable as a decent and hardworking bus boy. The scenes with Lyndsay Lohan as the selfless bride saving her friend from the jungles of Vietnam are very affecting, until one realises she’s marrying Elijah Wood, permanently stuck in that 14 year-old awkward stage; this is bad casting that doesn’t ring true.
Bookending the film are montages showing the immense social upheavels of the period, the heart-breakingly moving words of Robert Kennedy, and the devotion he inspired in the American people. These are so effective that one wonders whether Estevez’s time would have been better spent making a stirring documentary, rather than trying to get his point across by throwing lots of characters at the screen and hoping they’d stick emotionally with the audience. They all pale in significance to what should have been the focus of the film, Bobby. This is a campaigning piece of work, and one that will do nothing to counteract the Sheen Clan’s bleeding-heart Pinko image, but Kennedy’s words are so painfully pertinent to today that it would be a hard heart that could fail to be moved. All this seems quite divorced from the main meat of the film, making it a strange concoction that has its charms and its moments, but ultimately doesn’t produce a satisfying whole.
The action takes place on that fateful day of June 4th 1968, and in the fateful place of the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles. We follow a large selection of characters pulled from the staff and guests of the hotel in the run up to the senseless killing of Robert Kennedy. They are carefully selected to tick all the issue-boxes of the period, so we get ethnic tensions in the kitchen, emerging feminism in the bedroom, and anti-war sentiment in the wedding chapel. And of course the obligatory hippy. This is a portrait of a group of people in pain, a network of hurting individuals that we are supposed to get involved with; the musical interlude (to the excellent ‘Never Gonna Break My Faith’ by Aretha Franklin and Mary J. Blige, the only new song in a great contemporaneous soundtrack) evokes P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia, an altogether more effective member of this genre.
The starry cast produces great performances, but they are let down by a lack of focus and memorable dialogue. There doesn’t seem to any point to it all. It is never made clear who Martin Sheen and Helen Hunt’s couple are or why they are there (it’s certainly not to entertain or move you). Demi Moore’s alcoholic singer is very miserable, and that’s her whole story. Estevez gives himself a part as her husband, the role consisting only of walking a small dog in a daze.
Of the myriad storylines, there are some that work: the love triangle surrounding William H. Macy, with Sharon Stone’s world-weary wife and a deliciously doe-eyed Heather Graham as the Other Woman, is sensitively portrayed. Anthony Hopkins gives a lovingly gentle and naturalistic performance as a retired doorman who can’t bear to leave the hotel, and Freddy Rodriquez is adorable as a decent and hardworking bus boy. The scenes with Lyndsay Lohan as the selfless bride saving her friend from the jungles of Vietnam are very affecting, until one realises she’s marrying Elijah Wood, permanently stuck in that 14 year-old awkward stage; this is bad casting that doesn’t ring true.
Bookending the film are montages showing the immense social upheavels of the period, the heart-breakingly moving words of Robert Kennedy, and the devotion he inspired in the American people. These are so effective that one wonders whether Estevez’s time would have been better spent making a stirring documentary, rather than trying to get his point across by throwing lots of characters at the screen and hoping they’d stick emotionally with the audience. They all pale in significance to what should have been the focus of the film, Bobby. This is a campaigning piece of work, and one that will do nothing to counteract the Sheen Clan’s bleeding-heart Pinko image, but Kennedy’s words are so painfully pertinent to today that it would be a hard heart that could fail to be moved. All this seems quite divorced from the main meat of the film, making it a strange concoction that has its charms and its moments, but ultimately doesn’t produce a satisfying whole.
Review - Happy Feet
Happy Feet is a very strange film indeed, a feverish mix of Discovery Channel realism and Moulin Rouge-style inexplicable song and dance routines. Many contradictory ideas are flung in the ring and none really work, producing an exasperating 109 minutes in the cinema.
The premise is bizarre to begin with: Emperor Penguins each have a pop song that they start singing spontaneously in infancy (called, sickeningly, their ‘heart song’), which they later use to woo mates in choreographed sing-offs. Memphis (Hugh Jackman) and Norma Jean (Nichole Kidman), unnecessary and hideous Elvis and Marilyn Monroe-style penguins, meet in this good old-fashioned manner and soon have an egg. Memphis’s neglect during incubation means that their baby comes out all wrong; Mumble (Elijah Wood) cannot sing like all the other penguins, and has some hormonal problem that means he never fully goes through puberty, keeping some of his grey down. He sure can tap dance, though. Unfortunately tap dancing is ‘just not penguin’ (probably because with their strange ungainly bodies, even the moves of Fred Astaire look underwhelming when done by Emperor Penguin flippers ending up as a series of flappy noises, something the film-makers seem not to have realised), and the cute baby penguin is an outcast. His behaviour is deemed so subversive that when food becomes scarce, the elders of the community blame his heresy and cast him out.
What follows is the familiar Lion King story of Mumbles making some ‘amusing’ new friends (mostly voiced by Robin Williams) before his triumphant return to his home. This journey is a lot more disturbing than what we have seen before in the cute animal animation genre, however. He is chased by scary seals, whales, and captured by humans. The insane asylum atmosphere of the zoo is so effective that it may put children off them for life. The film goes from being a familiar story of an outsider gaining acceptance to a crusading parable for environmentalism, as Mumble realises that it is humans, not he, that are disrupting the food chain in the Antarctic. After forcing us to face grim reality, the ending is a huge cop-out, with a completely ridiculous turn of events (if humans ever saw penguins tap dancing, I don’t think we’d see it as an obvious plea to stop over fishing the seas).
The action is punctuated by song and dance numbers of familiar standards by the penguins, with Brittany Murphy as the sexy siren singing her heart out. These were quite infectious, but the makers of the film should have decided whether they were going for a frothy musical, or a worthy tale of our neglect of the environment. This uncertainty is also reflected in the visuals, as the characters and landscapes are beautifully designed to look as real as possible, but the characters are doing things that obviously penguins don’t do. If they’d have made them more ‘cute’ and anthropomorphic as in most animations, then this would not have been a problem. Obviously they wanted to cash in on the success of March of the Penguins by making it look as similar as possible to that documentary.
Maybe I am over analysing this. After all, it’s just a cartoon for children, and you’re supposed to suspend your disbelief. But the real crime is that Happy Feet just isn’t funny. Most of the high-profile CGI animations have succeeded by being amusing to both children and adults. I only laughed once. Most of the comedy is left to Robin Williams in two roles, giving him the chance to portray not one, but two racial stereotypes! It makes you glad that Hollywood isn’t producing any more motor-mouthed comedians to be hilarious cartoon sidekicks in the vein of Williams and Eddie Murphy.
This is a surreal and annoying mix of many ideas that just don’t gel. The film-makers got one thing right, though. They created the Emperor Penguin version of Elijah Wood perfectly: perma-pubescent and with piercing blue eyes always on the verge of tears.
The premise is bizarre to begin with: Emperor Penguins each have a pop song that they start singing spontaneously in infancy (called, sickeningly, their ‘heart song’), which they later use to woo mates in choreographed sing-offs. Memphis (Hugh Jackman) and Norma Jean (Nichole Kidman), unnecessary and hideous Elvis and Marilyn Monroe-style penguins, meet in this good old-fashioned manner and soon have an egg. Memphis’s neglect during incubation means that their baby comes out all wrong; Mumble (Elijah Wood) cannot sing like all the other penguins, and has some hormonal problem that means he never fully goes through puberty, keeping some of his grey down. He sure can tap dance, though. Unfortunately tap dancing is ‘just not penguin’ (probably because with their strange ungainly bodies, even the moves of Fred Astaire look underwhelming when done by Emperor Penguin flippers ending up as a series of flappy noises, something the film-makers seem not to have realised), and the cute baby penguin is an outcast. His behaviour is deemed so subversive that when food becomes scarce, the elders of the community blame his heresy and cast him out.
What follows is the familiar Lion King story of Mumbles making some ‘amusing’ new friends (mostly voiced by Robin Williams) before his triumphant return to his home. This journey is a lot more disturbing than what we have seen before in the cute animal animation genre, however. He is chased by scary seals, whales, and captured by humans. The insane asylum atmosphere of the zoo is so effective that it may put children off them for life. The film goes from being a familiar story of an outsider gaining acceptance to a crusading parable for environmentalism, as Mumble realises that it is humans, not he, that are disrupting the food chain in the Antarctic. After forcing us to face grim reality, the ending is a huge cop-out, with a completely ridiculous turn of events (if humans ever saw penguins tap dancing, I don’t think we’d see it as an obvious plea to stop over fishing the seas).
The action is punctuated by song and dance numbers of familiar standards by the penguins, with Brittany Murphy as the sexy siren singing her heart out. These were quite infectious, but the makers of the film should have decided whether they were going for a frothy musical, or a worthy tale of our neglect of the environment. This uncertainty is also reflected in the visuals, as the characters and landscapes are beautifully designed to look as real as possible, but the characters are doing things that obviously penguins don’t do. If they’d have made them more ‘cute’ and anthropomorphic as in most animations, then this would not have been a problem. Obviously they wanted to cash in on the success of March of the Penguins by making it look as similar as possible to that documentary.
Maybe I am over analysing this. After all, it’s just a cartoon for children, and you’re supposed to suspend your disbelief. But the real crime is that Happy Feet just isn’t funny. Most of the high-profile CGI animations have succeeded by being amusing to both children and adults. I only laughed once. Most of the comedy is left to Robin Williams in two roles, giving him the chance to portray not one, but two racial stereotypes! It makes you glad that Hollywood isn’t producing any more motor-mouthed comedians to be hilarious cartoon sidekicks in the vein of Williams and Eddie Murphy.
This is a surreal and annoying mix of many ideas that just don’t gel. The film-makers got one thing right, though. They created the Emperor Penguin version of Elijah Wood perfectly: perma-pubescent and with piercing blue eyes always on the verge of tears.
Review - Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Peter Süskind’s bestselling novel was long thought un-filmable, both by the many famous directors that passed on it and the writer himself. Its reliance on the description of scent, that most transient of the senses, made it a very challenging prospect, but thankfully one that Paul Tykwer (best known for directing 1998s techno-actioner Run, Lola, Run) took up. The graphic use of imagery evokes all sorts of smells, both sweet and putrid, very effectively, and this beauty contrasts wonderfully with the disturbing and riveting storyline.
The film centres on the very strange tale of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an orphan in 18th Century Paris with a supernatural sense of smell and absence of social skills. Played with a creepy innocence by newcomer Ben Whishaw (who I last saw on TV playing the put-upon Pingu in the great Nathan Barley), he is a man obsessed with capturing and preserving the scent of everyday things, and especially those of beautiful women with praeternaturally red hair. His quest takes him from the hell of slave labour in a tanning factory, to an up-market perfumer, to the beautiful country town of Grasse, leaving behind him a wake of death and destruction.
Whishaw is quite bland in the role, but I believe this works for the film, rather than against it. Jean-Baptiste has no discernable emotions and is more animal than human; he is able to skulk in the shadows unnoticed by everyone. The showboating is left to old pros Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman, who relish their supporting roles; the powdered wigs of the period make hamming it up the only option. Hoffman is great fun as the has-been perfumer whose business is given new life due to Jean-Baptiste’s skills, although his mid-lantic accent taking the place of Italian grates slightly. Rickman’s portrayal of a widowed father desperately trying to protect his daughter is surprisingly sensitive, though still grandiose.
The cinematography and score (composed by the director) are suitably lush, and the dirty beauty of Paris is beautifully realised. My only gripe is that in deciding to film the story in English, this German/French/Spanish co-production has had to make all the lower-class supporting characters have distracting mockney accents. It would have made a better film, though I’m sure a less economically successful one, to film it in French (or even German, since the writer of the novel and the director are both German). This is a small point, though, when Perfume still all adds up to a very enjoyable and deliciously mean-spirited dark fairytale.
The film centres on the very strange tale of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an orphan in 18th Century Paris with a supernatural sense of smell and absence of social skills. Played with a creepy innocence by newcomer Ben Whishaw (who I last saw on TV playing the put-upon Pingu in the great Nathan Barley), he is a man obsessed with capturing and preserving the scent of everyday things, and especially those of beautiful women with praeternaturally red hair. His quest takes him from the hell of slave labour in a tanning factory, to an up-market perfumer, to the beautiful country town of Grasse, leaving behind him a wake of death and destruction.
Whishaw is quite bland in the role, but I believe this works for the film, rather than against it. Jean-Baptiste has no discernable emotions and is more animal than human; he is able to skulk in the shadows unnoticed by everyone. The showboating is left to old pros Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman, who relish their supporting roles; the powdered wigs of the period make hamming it up the only option. Hoffman is great fun as the has-been perfumer whose business is given new life due to Jean-Baptiste’s skills, although his mid-lantic accent taking the place of Italian grates slightly. Rickman’s portrayal of a widowed father desperately trying to protect his daughter is surprisingly sensitive, though still grandiose.
The cinematography and score (composed by the director) are suitably lush, and the dirty beauty of Paris is beautifully realised. My only gripe is that in deciding to film the story in English, this German/French/Spanish co-production has had to make all the lower-class supporting characters have distracting mockney accents. It would have made a better film, though I’m sure a less economically successful one, to film it in French (or even German, since the writer of the novel and the director are both German). This is a small point, though, when Perfume still all adds up to a very enjoyable and deliciously mean-spirited dark fairytale.
Let me introduce myself...
Hello there! I'm Laura, and I'm going to be posting film reviews here, and maybe thoughts on other pop-cultural things. We'll see how it develops as I go along. I'd be very interested in any feedback, so feel free to comment!
I can be very opinionated, and tend to either love things or hate things, so don't expect many moderate, sober proclomations. I will endeavour to not put any spoilers on here, and if I do, I'll give ample warning (I hate that when it happens elsewhere).
To get an idea of my tastes, my favourite films include Reservoir Dogs, Coming Home, Goodfellas, Clerks, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, The Godfather Parts I and II, Rain Man, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Scrooged, Gattaca, Full Metal Jacket and Mean Streets. I'd say that makes me eclectic in my tastes, apart from an obvious leaning towards Vietnam war films.
So, without further ado, let's get critical.
Save the Texas Prairie Chicken!
- Laura
I can be very opinionated, and tend to either love things or hate things, so don't expect many moderate, sober proclomations. I will endeavour to not put any spoilers on here, and if I do, I'll give ample warning (I hate that when it happens elsewhere).
To get an idea of my tastes, my favourite films include Reservoir Dogs, Coming Home, Goodfellas, Clerks, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, The Godfather Parts I and II, Rain Man, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Scrooged, Gattaca, Full Metal Jacket and Mean Streets. I'd say that makes me eclectic in my tastes, apart from an obvious leaning towards Vietnam war films.
So, without further ado, let's get critical.
Save the Texas Prairie Chicken!
- Laura
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