Dead Man's Cards

For anyone who has been refused entry to, or forcibly ejected from, their evening venue of choice by a club bouncer, Dead Man's Cards offers an entertaining glimpse at the view from the other side of the threshold. Set around the mean streets of Liverpool, though largely interior, James Marquand's gritty debut feature inhabits a familiar underworld milieu but aspires to the mythology of the Western, picturing the tough guy doorman as Wild West lawman, a mediator of criminal and public spheres, and the one firm hand against a seething nocturnal life.

Retired heavyweight boxer Tom (James McMartin) takes a job on the door at a tawdry nightclub run by Billy the Cowboy (a delightful performance by the late Tom Bell), an ageing teddy boy with an immaculately greased quiff, combed eyebrows and a fixation on Wild Bill Hickok. Tom is taken under the wing of Paul (Paul Barber), a stocky, reptile-skinned security man who teaches him the finer points of 'meeting and greeting', including where to take troublemakers for rough treatment away from the gaze of security cameras. A former soldier who refuses to join forces with coke dealing gangland boss Chongi (Russell Mark), Paul is a man of scruples and dedication, but his taut, pulsating cranium warns of fierce volatility and a temper he is powerless to contain.

Next to this commanding presence, McMartin's Tom risks looking barred from his own party. Abandoned by his frustrated wife after being diagnosed as impotent, and saddled with a could have-been-a-contender failed-champion backstory, Tom is a hapless hired hand whose brutish effectiveness is repeatedly undermined by his lack of guile. Whether being fed pills and dreams of riches by Chongi's men or being doped with Viagra and involuntarily fellated by the club's amorous barmaid, Tom is too often the ursine bumbler to provide a dynamic centre to the narrative. His rocky marriage is sketchily drawn and provides little ballast, petering out in a couple of superficial shouting scenes.

But Dead Man's Cards biggest strength is its vibrantly scuzzy backdrop, which centres on Billy's club and the penumbral alley where intoxicated hordes queue for admission. Up to its rafters in grubby glamour, Billy's draws crowds whose behaviour is dictated by the skills of the club's various DJs, and Tom soon learns what kind of disorder and drug use to expect on any given night. Through it all strides the anachronistic proprietor, filtering out the repetitive beats with a private stream of country music on his headphones.

Billy imagines the club as a Western-style saloon, and it begins to assume that mythic character when Chongi zeroes in on the establishment to get at Paul: a Rio Bravo situation percolates. But while John Wayne enjoyed the benefit of a motley posse to help protect the jailhouse in Howard Hawks' Western, the tension in Dead Man's Cards is dissipated because Paul seems more than capable of keeping Chongi at bay single-handed. For all their big business bluster, Chongi and his men lack genuine menace; when a psyched up Paul asks Tom rhetorically 'do I look worried?', the viewer doesn't doubt that he isn't.

Every Rio Bravo needs its Walter Brennan and Marquand's film has two, with a local vagrant named Irish (Andrew Schofield) rivalling Billy in the doddery old-timer stakes. Dead Man's Cards bares an unexpectedly soft centre when Tom finds a task for Irish, interrupting his addled reveries to ask him to deliver a provocative parcel to Chongi. Irish is first encountered in a semi-fantasy sequence, fending off casual assailants with a length of metal piping magically transformed into a peashooter. Similarly, a fleeting, quasi-celestial vision, as a groggy Tom watches three girls sashaying down the street in hen-night angel wings, gestures at divinity. Though the redemption that seems promised for Tom fails to materialise, such moments reveal a film with half an eye on the stars, for all its wallowing in the gutter.

This review features in the January 2007 issue of Sight & Sound.

Joy Division

There’s no doubting the ambitious scope of Reg Traviss’ directorial debut, Joy Division. The opening minutes ricochet between a sun-scorched Mexico in 1966, a bomb-ravaged Germany towards the end of World War II, and a swinging London of Carnaby Street fashions and red phone boxes, though never - it should be clarified - to the post-punk Manchester of Ian Curtis. The latter’s band took its name from the 1955 novel House of Dolls by Holocaust survivor Ka-Tzetnik 135633, in which ‘joy divisions’ were groups of women kept as sex slaves in Nazi labour camps, a subject at which Traviss’ epic only tenuously hints.

The story follows young German Thomas (with Tom Schilling playing him as a boy and Ed Stoppard as an adult) through conscription, first love and the death of his parents to post-war KGB enrolment and a subsequent double-life in England. Finding a room in a London boarding house, he spends his time painting at his easel or in the bath with the landlord’s niece (Michelle Gayle), then ducking out for incognito rendezvous on park benches with equivocating KGB agent Dennis (Bernard Hill), his undercover contact.

Traviss has really made two films, a WWII love story and a London spy movie (the bookend sequences in the sweating haze of Central America hint at a third). But, despite his confident jumbling of places and times, Traviss fails to conceal either the thinness of his material or its thematic banality. The spy story, in which Thomas feels the pinch as his KGB superiors come to suspect his contact’s loyalty to the cause, is fatally underwritten, hiding the vague plot behind turned up coat collars and a convoluted algebra of code-speak that, post-Austin Powers, feels absurdly straight-faced. Even so, these scenes have a boyish appeal, the pleasingly minimal art direction conjuring tangible mystery from Bakelite telephones and revolving tape spools.

At times this abstracted milieu recalls TV classics such as The Avengers, and so cries out for a charismatic spy hero of the calibre of John Steed. Instead, Stoppard’s Thomas is pallidly earnest, a scrambled cipher of a protagonist. Schilling is no less winsome, and Joy Division is at its lowest ebb in amber scenes of puppy love with pigtailed Melanie (Bernadette Heerwagen) back in Germany. The coyness of these moments makes for an uneasy contrast with later, lingering shots of her repeated rape by Russian soldiers (the closest the film gets to the sexual horrors of the actual joy divisions). Again, Traviss’ film is partially salvaged by its production design, and by the director’s remarkably sure handling of the larger canvas. The wartime scenes amid the rubble of a devastated Germany are atmospherically achieved with a terrible authenticity that sits incongruously with the blank-slate characters.


This review features in the December 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.

The Plague

Greg Hall’s ultra-low-budget feature debut, The Plague, arrives for a belated theatrical release having taken an unusually circuitous route to the screen. Turned down for funding by the UK Film Council, allegedly for its narrow audience appeal, Hall subsequently shot the film on Mini DV for an independently raised £3,300. Though the result failed to attract a distributor at the initial, woefully attended, industry screening, The Plague found a champion in Mike Leigh, who became instrumental in getting it chosen for the London Film Festival in 2004 and in awarding Hall the first Katrin Cartlidge Award. A distribution deal remained elusive despite further festival interest and The Plague was eventually streamed online, becoming only the second film to receive its commercial premiere on the internet.

Though two years have now elapsed since its first screening in London, The Plague feels irrepressibly fresh, having lost none of its relevance in the interim. Following four friends on an anonymous housing estate in London as they scrape their way through a weekend of transgression, Hall’s film is a zippy and authentic slice of inner-city life. Beginning on a dossy Friday morning as the group convenes to score some cannabis, the film presents black friends Alex (Samuel Anokye), who promises his dealer that they will have his money by 6pm the next day; Tom (David Bonnick Junior), a college boy who is keen on the dealer’s sister, Debs; their white neighbour Matt (Brett Harris), who is hosting the party during which they hope to sell on their stash; and Asian Muslim Ravi (Nur Alam Rabman), who is mixed up with a local fraudster, withdrawing money on friends’ bank cards that are subsequently claimed stolen.

Famed British emcee SkinnyMan appears at sporadic junctures, broadcasting freestyle poetry on pirate radio station Destruction FM and providing a chorus figure to the action by riffing on urban squalor and political oppression. These themes, adumbrated in an opening montage (riots, fast food, George W. Bush, nuclear mushroom clouds, Tony Blair), course through The Plague, but Hall hardly hectors, preferring to emphasise the vibrancy rather than the desperation of the characters’ delinquency. The dynamic between the friends convinces, its pointed multi-racialism never feeling tokenistic, and though the budgetary restraints tell in some of the supporting performances, the four leads are captivating. Tom’s slightly sheepish courtship of Debs, hinging on an ingenuous exchange of text messages, and Ravi’s faltering observation of Ramadan (he is shown guiltily devouring a chocolate bar after a confrontation with some racist skinheads) lend an endearing humanity to their streetwise bravado.

The drama may have a predictable thrust, with the friends’ drug dealing not exactly going as planned, but its momentum is frequently derailed by ambling, larky interludes in which the characters roll joints, discuss records or freestyle rap together. The Plague is as gleeful as a film about four young friends should be, as intent on fun and as sympathetic to banter. A well observed scene in which the four deliver cannabis to a nervy squatter taken to breathing mouthfuls of ignited paraffin at intruders in anticipation of the police is typical of the film’s languorous approach to dialogue: the sequence unfurls lazily ins babble of uncompromising indecipherability. Only in a confused climax at s warehouse party, when the group’s trippy intoxication is interrupted by the arrival of their angered dealer and riot police, does the film’s waywardness become problematic, the ensuing chaos needing greater coherence to satisfy. Otherwise, The Plague is bracing and engaged cinema; it’s hard to imagine what reluctant funders could have considered more vital.

This review features in the November 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.

Man Push Cart

Ramin Bahrani’s Man Push Cart begins before the crack of dawn as Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi), a Pakistani immigrant in New York, heaves his mobile coffee stand up a street bathed in the impatient headlights of nocturnal traffic. The scene recurs with cyclical inevitability throughout the film, structuring the story around the laborious repetition of Ahmad’s daily grind. Accruing metaphorical potency as Ahmad’s uphill struggle to make ends meet gets steeper, the image becomes indelible.

Returning to the US following a stint in his parents’ homeland, Iran, where he made his student film Strangers (2000), Bahrani shows Manhattan from the other side of the bagel counter, outlining Abmad’s practised routine – the igniting of his boiler, the tidy piling up of pastries, the restocking of disposable cups – in acutely observed detail. Uncommon in US cinema, this fascination with the quotidian reveals an affinity with the work of the Dardenne brothers, recalling the similar rituals undertaken on a waffle stand by the heroine of their 1999 film Rosetta. Like the Dardennes, Bahrani insists on the dignity of professionalism, irrespective of the mundanity of the task, and similarly emphasises Ahmad’s vital dependence on these procedures as the anchor to his increasingly fraught existence.

The performance by Razvi, himself a cart vendor plucked off the street by the director, is remarkable, imparting a poignant susceptibility to Ahmad’s surface stoicism. Once a popular singing star in Lahore, Ahmad has acclimatised to a lowlier place in his new city’s pecking order. Dedicatedly applying himself to a workaday existence defined by transactions, he trades hot drinks and morning friendliness by day and pirate DVDs off duty. He is also forced to barter with the hostile parents of his late wife for time with the estranged son they have taken into supervision, whom Ahmad attempts to placate with what toys he can afford. Even his courtship of Noemi (Leticia Dolera), the Spanish woman working at a nearby news-stand, is predicated on a series of informal deals: the team effort in restacking her cart’s refrigerator, then her trading of music magazines for a cup of tea.

Much of Man Push Cart’s dramatic tension comes from Ahmad’s dealings with Muhammad (Charles Daniel Sandoval), a wealthy fellow ex-pat whose attitude to Ahmad oscillates treacherously. Initially hiring him for some decorating work, when Mohammad recognises Ahmad he is untactfully astonished at the depths to which the former celebrity has sunk and embarrassed by Ahmad’s subservience, telling him not to wash their takeaway dishes as ‘there’s someone else to do that’. His priorities shift after he is introduced to Noemi, when he takes advantage of Ahmad’s emotional reticence to make a more assertive play for her affections. During a group weekend in the country, Mohammad feels no compunction in asking Ahmad to take out the rubbish while he steals a moment alone with Noemi.

If Bahrani’s approach were not so judiciously even-handed, his film might have become a dank wallow in pathos. But Ahmad is not simply a downtrodden innocent, handicapped by circumstances. His inability to express his feelings for Noemi and his unwillingness to capitalise on the opportunities offered him by Mohammad reveal a frustrating inertia in contrast with his work life tenacity; while Mohammad is less the villain of the piece than someone whose own desires undermine his intended charity. The scene in which a Muslim acquaintance of Ahmad reveals a large abdominal scar, the result of an incident in which a gang took him for a ‘terrorist’, gives a powerfully understated acknowledgement of the contemporary racial tensions facing immigrant populations in the west. More melodramatic Manhattans might have thronged with muggers and miscreants; in Man Push Cart New Yorkers seem affably benign, keen to converse while Ahmad makes their cappuccinos, if lamentably oblivious to his quiet tragedy.

This review features in the October 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.

Snow Cake

Midway through Snow Cake, a neighbour of high-functioning autistic woman Linda Freeman (Sigourney Weaver) says: ‘I know all about autism. I’ve seen that movie.’ The reference, surely, is to Hollywood’s most famous dalliance with the condition, Barry Levinson’s Rain Man. Snow Cake, directed by Marc Evans from a first screenplay by Angela Pell, mocks such faith in cinema’s ability to ameliorate ignorance about complex medical conditions, but simultaneously strives to provide such a service itself. The film-makers attempt to have their cake and eat it.

Snow Cake begins amid the dazzle of white light streaming through a cabin window of the plane in which Englishman Alex Hughes (Alan Rickman) pensively watches the cloudscapes high over Canada. Journeying to meet the mother of a son he never met, who has been killed in a road accident, Alex’s lingering grief is limned in Rickman’s haggard features, his ebbing spirit externalised in the blanched northern skies and melting snow. In a schematic early twist, a truck crashes into his car, killing a young hitchhiking passenger, Vivienne, and Alex takes a detour to the small town of Wawa to console Vivienne’s mother, Linda.

Reminiscent of The Sweet Hereafter and Insomnia in its use of a wintry backdrop to its protagonist’s corrosive guilt, it more closely resembles Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground, in which an embittered cop finds spiritual renewal in snowy upstate New York when he meets a blind woman whose simple faith restores his humanity. Vivienne’s mother offers similar salvation for Alex: he is by turns alarmed and amused by Linda’s childlike behaviour, neurotic preoccupations and apparent indifference to her daughter’s death. But, in a process neatly, though not always subtly, mirrored in the snow thawing around Wawa, Alex warms to Linda, seeing in her emotional forthrightness and euphoric outbursts an alternative to his own morose wallowing.

Weaver captures Linda’s polar modes of agitation and entrancement with striking verisimilitude. One scene in which she and Alex play ‘comic-book Scrabble’, taking turns to invent a word and then use it in an improvised sentence, is delightful. Weaver holds the viewer spellbound as Linda coins ‘dazlious’ to trump Alex’s lacklustre effort, and her spontaneous sentence is a liquid, spiralling flight of fancy that testifies to her extraordinary mental dexterity. But Weaver’s performance can seem too studied an impersonation, a work of mimicry that feels at times like a starry jaunt through an autistic tick list.

The film’s ploy is to make Alex seem at home in a strange town – he is quickly prized by Wawa’s community for his English accent and all but jumped upon by another of Linda’s neighbours, Maggie (Carrie-Anne Moss) – but a stranger in Linda’s autistic world, where he has to fumble around for a binding logic. He makes a better job of the latter than some of the bit parts, who stand around citing familiar suppositions about autism or bemoaning Linda’s social etiquette (‘this is a wake!’ cries one lady at Vivienne’s funeral, aghast at Linda’s lack of solemnity). But the script falls foul of cliché itself, attributing an innate innocence to Linda that sentimentalises her condition. Teetering into whimsy when Linda imagines escaping the dreary funeral reception for a posthumous dance with Vivienne, Snow Cake ultimately collapses around its own soft centre.

This review features in the October 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.

Tom-Yum-Goong (Warrior King)

For UK distribution, Prachya Pinkaew’s second collaboration with martial arts sensation Tony Jaa has been given the bland English title Warrior King. Given the film’s jostle of flavours, the Thai title, Tom-Yum-Goong – the name of a traditional hot and sour soup – is much more appropriate. Emboldened by the success of the pair’s Ong-Bak (2003), which first established Jaa as an action superstar in the Jackie Chan mould, Warrior King risks an uneven tone with its heady mix of twee sentimentality, broad humour and underworld nastiness, but the director skips through these shifting moods with limbered confidence.

Opting for broken bones over narrative sinew, Pinkaew recycles Ong-Bak’s skeletal plot to frame Jaa’s Muay Thai skills in a series of body-splintering, no-wires fight sequences. Jaa again plays a country boy, this time called Kham, who sets off for the big city in pursuit of gangsters who have stolen prized property, in this case pet elephant Por Yai and its calf Korn. Early scenes give little hint of the mayhem to follow, establishing a teasing lull before Kham is spurred into action: sequences in the Thai village which show Kham being carried along in the elder elephant’s tusks or giving the beast a scrub down in the river are bathed in the roseate soft focus of rural tranquillity.

The pachyderm-like slowness of this opening is soon compensated for. When the elephants are abducted and whisked away to Australia, Kham is quickly on a plane in pursuit, heading straight to Sydney’s Thaitown. Jaa’s character in Ong-Bak was encumbered with a pacifism bred into him by his mentor, and so refused to lift a combative finger except when coaxed or tricked into the ring. Kham has no such qualms: tracing his animals to Tom-Yom-Goong, a Thai restaurant run by transsexual femme fatale Madame Rose (Jin Xing), he lets rip on dozens of her henchmen, demanding ‘where is my elephant?’ through the blur of flailing limbs. This culminates in a mind-boggling four-minute take when, having learned of the demise of Por Yai, Kham defends himself against a roomful of people, relentlessly laying waste to all-comers.

Pinkaew builds on his breakthrough film with a bigger, brasher appeal to global markets, clearly relishing a larger budget, an overseas shoot and the challenge (with the help of famed choreographer Panna Rithikrai) of making the fight scenes match up to those that made his name. This more-is-more approach has not stifled the blithe peppiness that animated Ong-Bak. There is still as little time for women, Australians are depicted as either corrupt or stupid, and the comedy scenes featuring Thaitown beat cop Sergeant Mark (Phetthai Wongkamlao) are less appealing than the film’s scattering of playful in-jokes, which include a cameo by a Jackie Chan doppelganger. Nevertheless, there is a buoyancy to the film that inclines one to overlook its shortcomings, perhaps because its arrogance is not yet the hubris of the Hollywood action movie but the temerity of a cocky upstart.

This review features in the September 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.

The Lake House

From its opening montage showing line after line of spidery calligraphy, The Lake House marks itself as the anti-You’ve Got Mail, renouncing that movie’s computer-age reliance on email and attempting to reclaim handwritten letters as the nexus of film romance. If epistolary love affairs – with their cycle of reading, writing and waiting for a reply – are inherently uncinematic, The Lake House offers an intriguing time-lapse solution. Reunited for the first time since Speed (1994), Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves are Kate and Alex, tenants of the eponymous house living two years apart but able to communicate via notes left in the house’s mailbox.

Adapted from the 2000 Korean drama Shiweolae, Alejandro Agresti’s film thus creates both an obstacle to the course of the couple’s love – they fall for each other immediately but have trouble meeting up in their respective time zones – and an effective delivery system for their billets-doux. Notes posted by Alex in 2004 appear instantaneously in the same mailbox in Kate’s 2006, and vice versa, with none of the lovelorn clock-watching that might have deadened the story’s pace. The immediate response time allows the couple to use brief, conversational phrases (‘Who are you?’ ‘Can this be happening?’) reminiscent of web chatroom speak. Though peppered with references to Kerouac, Dostoevsky and Jane Austen, this bookish romance is perhaps less literary than it claims.

Playwright David Auburn’s script works hard to convince us that the two-year barrier is as insurmountable as the characters believe. In a scene of near contact at a railway station, Alex chases after the departing train on which the 2004 Kate, who does not yet know who he is, looks bemusedly out from her accelerating carriage. Agresti aims for Brief Encounter levels of heightened pathos, but the moment is undermined by the viewer’s nagging feeling that the pair are making their rendezvous more difficult than it need be. Bullock’s Kate, in particular, appears resigned to tormented inertia.

Apart from providing the opportunity for one or two novel romantic gestures, as when Alex plants a sapling outside Kate’s future window that grows, as if in a second, into a beautiful tree, the concurrent timeframes merely entangle the narrative in space-time paradoxes, which could be happily overlooked if more fun had been had with time-juggling. Instead, the device seems an arbitrary means of delaying consummation, not unlike Kate’s de facto boyfriend Morgan (Dylan Walsh), a priggish bore who forgets Valentine’s Day and responds to a passionate scene between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious by asking Kate to turn the television down.

The film’s third character should really have been the lake house of the title, a glass-walled bungalow standing on stilts on the shoreline of Lake Michigan. Regrettably, the building is imbued with neither the physical presence nor the required aura of magic to justify its centrality to the narrative. How disappointing that in this hymn to the letter, the house itself should prove not worth writing home about.

This review features in the August 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.

Half Light

Don’t look now, but while his parents – bestselling novelist Rachel Carson (Demi Moore) and her envious, unpublished husband, Brian (Henry Ian Cusick) – obsess over their work in the study of their canal-side townhouse, little Thomas is outside and playing a little too close to the water. When the inevitable tragedy occurs, Rachel relocates to a Scottish island and, as in Nicholas Roeg’s 1973 classic, it is not long before the local psychic is having visions of the drowned child. Half Light creates immediate problems by aping the plot of Don’t Look Now so closely: director Craig Rosenberg’s handling of the opening drowning scene appears flatly conventional next to Roeg’s visionary fragmentation. But as the derivative waters become muddied with elements from Vertigo and The Shining, an enjoyably trashy mystery brews.

In her first starring role since Passion of Mind (2000), Moore is gamely incongruous as the London-based American author donning flat cap to seek renewed inspiration and emotional solace in the Scottish wilds. Amid the heather and crashing waves, she falls in love with the tousle-haired lighthouse keeper Angus (Hans Matheson), but remains haunted by the past. Thomas’ former toys become the medium for a series of eerie messages, apparently from beyond the grave: an Etch A Sketch self-writes ‘look behind you’ warnings, a toy soldier barks automated threats, magnetic letters on the refrigerator are repositioned to read ‘Thomas was here’. Oddly, this proves freakier for Rachel than it is for the viewer; unlike the activities of the ventriloquist’s homicidal dummy in Dead of Night, glimpsed on a TV screen at one point during this film, the frights from these inanimate playthings seem more silly than sinister.

Rosenberg makes no bones about employing the tawdriest of tactics. As Rachel’s hysteria escalates, she is visited by Thomas’ spirit, which seems intent on forcing her to join him in a watery death. Suddenly she awakens: the preceding moments are revealed as her nightmare. Immediately she is aware again of Thomas’ presence, before again waking up. Then we hear the tell-tale sound of Thomas’ breath once more… It feels as if the foundations for a devilish Shyamalan-esque twist are being laid (one of Rachel’s bestsellers has the teasing title ‘Dreamers Awake’) and for a gloriously ridiculous instant we half expect the film to get swallowed up by an unending succession of Russian-doll realities. Damagingly, this cheap-shot mise en abîme makes us laugh when we should be scared and undermines our belief in Half Light’s remaining horror set-pieces.

The director, whose only previous film is the 1996 rom-com Hotel de Love, handles the affair between Rachel and Angus just as ineffectively. Yet sequences of the couple riding horses together on the beach, making love by a fireside and sending Morse-coded messages to each other from their respective windows do lend the film an endearingly unabashed corniness. This reaches an almost operatic apotheosis when the lovers ascend to the top of the lighthouse, the camera swooningly following them up and up before pulling back to frame them against the seascape as the orchestra crescendoes. Dizzying in its kitschy grandeur, such soapy audacity makes Half Light shine more brightly than it might have done, but will also probably leave you with toes to uncurl.

This review appears in the August 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.

Silent Hill

There is a well-worn adage that film adaptations of computer games can seem like watching a game being played by somebody else. Inspired by a popular series of survival-horror videogames set in a derelict US mining town that is possessed by an evil force, Christophe Gans’ Silent Hill is no exception. With its obstacle-course narrative of abrupt ambushes and perversely hidden clues, and its vividly dimensional visual environments, Silent Hill is a striking approximation of the gaming format. But the bare bones characterisation, rigidly episodic structure and overcrowded frames permissible in first-person role-play prove stubbornly uninvolving on the big screen.

Gans treats exposition with impatience. The opening shows adoptive parents Rose (Radha Mitchell) and Christopher (Sean Bean) dash out into the night after their sleepwalking daughter Sharon, who leads them to the top of a thunderous waterfall. As Sharon peers over its edge, a vortex to a terrifying infernal realm opens before her eyes. She sees the face of a mysterious doppelganger staring out at her from the flames, before collapsing in her parents’ arms, repeating the words ‘Silent Hill’. Soon Rose is ignoring the advice of her husband and driving Sharon at night to the ghost town named in her reverie, refusing to stop for a curious policewoman along the way, and smashing at high speed through a metal enclosure gate as if to the action movie born. Bean is given little to do during a half-hearted search for his missing family except shout into his mobile. He soon drops out of the story, later to be found napping at home on the settee when Rose and Sharon return battle-scarred. Rose is the resilient mother, Christopher the concerned father; Roger Avary’s script fleshes out neither beyond these archetypes.

Conversely, Sharon’s back-story – her connection with Alessa, the girl-demon tormenting Silent Hill’s paranoid, puritan inhabitants as revenge for burning her alive – unravels at inordinate length. The director, whose period horror movie Le Pacte des loups (2001) also featured a society fearful of supernatural forces it could not understand, at times reaches for the allegorical resonance of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in his depiction of a community whipped into zealous frenzy by superstition. He is more at home milking sealed-off-community-with-a-sinister-past clichés: the radios that buzz out of frequency when the town’s borders are broached; the nearby gas station attendants whose eyebrows raise at the town’s mention.

Juggling different time dimensions, Gans uses a distinct visual scheme to separate Christopher’s search for his family – captured in golden, sunlit tones – from the possessed Silent Hill. The moment when Rose realises that the thick grey fog enshrouding Silent Hill is airborne ash from a still smouldering subterranean fire is memorably achieved – a rare example of atmosphere. Less successful are relentless scenes in which Rose is assaulted by a menagerie of deformities. Such grotesquery is not enough to keep a story afloat – unless, that is, the spectator is in control, finger on the trigger.

This review features in the July 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.

Stay Alive

From Angel Heart to The Skeleton Key, horror films have found fertile terrain in the miasmic swamplands and arcane superstitions popularly associated with Louisiana. Stay Alive, the last film to be shot in New Orleans before the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina last summer, makes familiar use of a haunted plantation but otherwise wastes its locations. Director William Brent Bell’s interest in the real world, like that of his videogame-playing protagonists, is subsumed throughout by a preference for the virtual sheen of graphics.

The film’s title refers to an unreleased first-person shooter game in which grisly ‘game over’ moments ominously foreshadow the exact nature of the gamer’s impending demise. When an eager beta tester is killed playing ‘Stay Alive’, a group of his friends take up the multi-player challenge, unwisely reading aloud the game’s introductory incantation and entering a crepuscular game-world of inky skies, a forbidding tower and crypts swarming with preternatural adversaries. That these adversaries include crawling child-women with long dark hair is not the only giveaway that Stay Alive’s plot is borrowed wholesale from Hideo Nakata’s The Ring.

Stay Alive is unlikely to win over audiences wary of movies either centring on computers or adapted from computer games, especially as the film-makers struggle to integrate pixels and reality. Forced by serial tragedy to abandon playing the game in favour of hunting down its developers, survivors Hutch, Abigail and Swink trace the genesis of ‘Stay Alive’ to a decaying plantation mansion recognisable as the one from the game. As Hutch’s climactic search is intercut with Swink’s simultaneous exploration of the mansion in 3D platform mode, the editing is brisk, as if apologetic for making us experience these scenes twice.

At the heart of the mystery is Elizabeth (Erzsébet) Báthory, history’s notorious ‘Blood Countess’, who murdered her way through the young girls of 16th-century Hungary, though it is not explained why her story has been transposed to New Orleans or what her connection with 21st-Century videogame programming might be. It feels broadly logical that her spirit should be reawakened by the game’s opening invocation, but her motives for meticulously replicating the in-game deaths remain vague.

Eschewing the current trend for gratuitous gore in horror cinema, Stay Alive insinuates rather than revels in its gruesome content, though elliptical cutaways suggest a clumsy, late-in-the-day re-editing for a teenage audience more than faith in the viewer’s ability to imagine what is not shown. Otherwise, the uninspired direction adheres to a horror-by-numbers formula over-reliant on amplified musical exclamations, the sounds of clapping thunder and neighing horses.

This review features in the July 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.

Scary Movie 4

Out-sequelling original inspiration Scream, the Scary Movie series continues with what the new film’s poster assures us will be ‘the fourth and final chapter of the trilogy’. As with his Scary Movie 3 (2003), director David Zucker shows increasingly less interest in the horror genre parody of the Wayans brothers’ first two films in the series in favour of a less focused pastiche. With non-horror fare like Brokeback Mountain and Million Dollar Baby brought in for lampooning alongside Saw and The Village, and featuring running jokes from the previous instalments, Scary Movie 4 presents a thick pea soup of intertextuality that would likely flummox even ardent cinernagoers were its humour subtler.

More than ever before, the plot exists as a surreal pot-pourri of elements from better films. The forced logic of the narrative is best experienced as a warped dream. Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris) moves into a new house to look after an elderly disabled woman (played by Cloris Leachman providing an unfortunate reminder of earlier, funnier horror spoof Young Frankenstein) and is menaced by the sprite-child from Takashi Shimizu’s The Grudge, who claims that his father holds the secret to repelling a destructive invasion by ‘Karma Chameleon’-playing alien tripods (or tr-iPods). As displaced communities take to the road in an apocalyptic exodus a la Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, Cindy and Scary Movie regular Brenda (Regina Hall) make their way to a prelapsarian settlement straight out of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. There they find the boy’s father, and much fun is had by the characters not speaking about ‘those we don’t speak of.’

These random, unconnected cinematic targets make for a more piecemeal parody than was provided by the first Scary Movie film, which focused on the Wes Craven school of ironic teen slasher movies. If it seemed redundant to satirise films that were essentially commentaries upon themselves (Scream had already made all the knowing genre jokes that the Scary Movie series has subsequently turned into a cottage industry), at least the portentous, post-9/11 solemnity of the Spielberg and Shyamalan films is more in need of deflation. Yet of the movies spoofed in Scary Movie 4, perhaps only Brokeback Mountain is sufficiently iconic to raise audience-wide chuckles of familiarity, and this opportunity is squandered with a broad and rather obvious camping-up of that film’s delicate love story. The romance is squeezed into the narrative in one of those self-contained flashbacks that Zucker has been doing since the Saturday Night Fever sequence in Airplane! (1980).

Infantile comedy and snide stereotyping still dominate, making it difficult to warm to the few compensatory pleasures. Craig Bierko’s merciless send-up of Tom Cruise’s infamously animated appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show arrives too late. In one of the more inspired gags, a dazed swarm of dispossessed citizens of the type familiar from so many disaster movies is mistaken – as if they have wandered into another film for an army of zombies and gunned down: it is a witty acknowledgement of Scary Movie 4’s genre confusion, albeit one with unpleasant echoes of real-life post-trauma imagery.

This review features in the June 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.

Hostel

Eli Roth’s Hostel begins in a similar vein to Danny Boyle’s The Beach (2000), with thrill-hungry travellers lured off the beaten track by promises of a backpackers’ utopia. In this case the travellers’ paradise is a remote Slovakian hostel where concupiscent eastern European women throw themselves at eager American visitors. But the hostel is a lure for a scam of fearsome depravity: once sucked in, guests are tortured to death for the pleasure of paying sadists.

Venturing further afield after the backwoods camping-trip horror of Cabin Fever (2003), writer-director Roth locates even greater terrors in that mysterious part of the world known as ‘not America’. Indulging the greedy libidos and unbridled hedonism of its inter-railing Californians Josh and Paxton, before punishing them with sustained torment, Hostel is a cautionary tale riddled with a deep paranoia about foreignness. Suspicious of strangers on trains, massed local children and conversations in unintelligible tongues, the film is a virtual wagging finger against journeying overseas.

With an outsider’s eye for eerie otherness, Roth shoots the Slovakian streets as if they are the Venice alleyways of Don’t Look Now; figures appear without warning and disappear without explanation. He avoids the readymade creepiness evoked by filming in pockets of shadowy darkness in favour of scenes that take place in appealingly pellucid daylight. Below ground, prolonged scenes of recreational torture in rank, blood-swilled chambers are charged with an extra frisson of claustrophobic dread by their contrast with such crisp, tourist-brochure sunniness.

Hostel switches from randy teen comedy to cold-sweat nightmare with disconcerting punch. One senses the giddy approval of Quentin Tarantino, whose executive-producer credit gives only a hint of the extent of his mentorship. Roth cheerfully acknowledges his debt: we see a glimpse of Pulp Fiction’s Ezekiel 25:17 scene dubbed into Slovak on a hostel TV; and torture sequences from at least two Tarantino films are invoked during the second half. Modern Japanese horror is the other clear inspiration, and pulp-cinema visionary Takashi Miike appears for a chilling cameo. Hostel and Miike’s Audition share the same glee in the sadistic, acupunctural precision of pain application.

Depicted in unblinking detail, Hostel’s later stages are only for the strongest of stomachs; sporadic gallows humour and film-making verve temper what would otherwise have been indigestible. Hostel confirms Roth as one of the brighter hopes for mainstream horror. As yet he seems willingly confined by the genre’s exploitative parameters. With greater rigour, he might have pushed the disquieting implications of his film’s premise (which is like something out of a J.G. Ballard short story) and made the connection between the paid-for torture in his narrative and the vicarious pleasures of his film’s viewers. Instead, the troubling climax lets us wallow in violent retribution.

This review features in the May 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.

Running Scared

In Wayne Kramer’s Running Scared, sprawling, suburban New Jersey assumes nightmare proportions for two young boys: Nicky and his Russian neighbour Oleg are inducted into a netherworld of mobsters, prostitutes and paedophiles. Just as Kramer’s previous film The Cooler (2003) hinted at an almost magical dimension existing alongside the vicious pragmatism of a Vegas casino, for the stray friends in Running Scared gangland resembles an iniquitous fairytale realm, albeit one beyond even the darkest imaginings of the brothers Grimm.

The ostensible protagonist is Nicky’s dad Joey, a bottom-rung gangster forced to trawl his neighbourhood in search of Oleg, in order to recover an incriminating .38 that the boy has stolen from his basement. Perhaps we are intended to sympathise with Joey. Like the majority of the film’s adult characters, however, he’s so self-serving, volatile and brutish, that our point of identification transposes to the pre-teens. It is from this wide-eyed perspective that we bear witness to unending acts of violence. Foremost is the moment when Joey is held down on an ice rink while a hockey puck is hit repeatedly at his face.

Kramer’s breakneck visual style is similarly bludgeoning. Captured in a frenzy of flashy sound editing and ricocheting camera movements, Running Scared plays as an interminably sustained crescendo. There is no time for the sense of enchantment or mystery that would have legitimised Kramer’s pretensions to fairytale; the film passes in a vertiginous blur of comic-book hyper-reality, leaving an end-title sequence, which recasts the narrative’s main events in Lemony Snicket-esque tableaux, to exhume this subtext.

Running Scared’s most chilling scene occurs when Oleg takes refuge in the back of a van, where he is found and taken home by an outwardly altruistic, middle-class couple. The pastel interiors of their bungalow provide relief after the strip joints and dives encountered thus far, but seem increasingly hellish as full realisation of the pair’s heinous intention dawns. As Oleg locks himself in their bathroom and tries to phone for help, we see frightful flickers of an emaciated Nosferatu-like shadow across the walls. This is a sequence of gut-churning horror. But it is included with disturbing casualness by the film-makers, as just another twist in their nocturnal picaresque, or to establish a hierarchy of immorality that will excuse the nastiness elsewhere.

This review features in the March 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.

Wild Country

Interrupted by a feral shepherd while answering the call of nature deep in the wilds of Scotland, a teenaged girl tells her fellow hikers: ‘I don’t think we should stay here tonight.’ The remark is more pertinent than they are aware: the moment is intercut with footage of the shepherd’s messy evisceration by an unnaturally large wolf. This implies a knowingness about the clichés of the horror genre reminiscent of the flippant postmodernisms of Wet Craven, yet Wild Country – the brisk feature debut of writer Craig Strachan – actually starts out with a low-key social realism closer to the work of Ken Loach.

Beginning with a close-up on the pained face of young Kelly Ann (newcomer Samantha Shields) as she gives birth to the child she will surrender for adoption, the opening scenes are lent a naturalistic immediacy by handheld camerawork and earthy dialogue delivered in thick Glaswegian burr. There is no gruesome prologue to hint at what is to come, just an eerie Burtonesque title sequence drifting in stark, graphically rendered woodland. Not until Father Steve (Peter Capaldi) drives Kelly Ann and the other young hikers in his charge through bleak terrain to the drop-off point at the start of their walk does the film adopt a spooky tenor. As the priest relates a legend of local cannibalism to his incredulous passengers, his eyebrows distort in the rear-view mirror as if in the throes of lycanthropic metamorphosis.

He might, perhaps, just as well tell them about the family of werewolves that ravaged the platoon of soldiers on an exercise in the Scottish Highlands in Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers (2002), Wild Country’s closest recent forebear. The long scenes in the dark in Marshall’s film were leavened by sequences simulating lupine night vision. When night falls in Wild Country, there is not even a full moon to illuminate proceedings; the onset of the wolf’s horrific attacks is shrouded in a sable blackness, which only occasional spurts of garish blood brighten. With the teenagers getting fatally mauled one by one, the challenging combination of broad regional accents and visual opacity makes the story’s central third bewildering.

In other ways this murkiness works to advantage. Sudden, barely perceptible movements in the grass, disclosing the approach of the wolf through the darkness, induce a palpable chill. Restricted vision also delays full sight of the rather hokey creatures: SFX designer Bob Keen’s wolf effects are less convincing than those he created for Dog Soldiers. Roaming on all fours (it is not clarified until the final scene that the wolves are mutant), the predators’ bulbous, latexy snouts whiff of artifice. When Kelly Ann, her ex-boyfriend and the rescued foundling that may or may not be the couple’s own child seek shelter in the branches of a tree as dawn breaks over an open moor, a visually rich moment is made incongruously humorous by a daylight glimpse of the snuffling werewolf circling beneath.

Yet this nascent family unit gives Strachan’s film a human interest utterly lacking in the relentless Dog Soldiers. The awakening of Kelly Ann’s maternal instinct offers an engaging counterpoint to the capricious bloodletting. So it’s difficult not to feel cheated by the shift in tone of the climax, when Wild Country itself metamorphoses, succumbing to a different form of lunacy with an awkward lurch into farce.

This review features in the March 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.

Frozen

Mining the same rich contrast between the mythic and the mundane as her prize-winning short Mavis and the Mermaid (2000), Juliet McKoen’s Frozen is a resolutely indigenous feature debut. Shot on high-definition video around Lancashire’s desolate Morecambe Bay, the film taps into a wealth of psychogeographic associations, bringing deep resonances to a flawed narrative with a vivid sense of locality.

As Kath Swarbrick, a factory worker tormented by the unsolved disappearance of her sister Annie two years previously, Shirley Henderson (face often hidden anxiously within the fur of her coat hood) strikes an absorbing combination of pluck and fragility. The character’s childlike vulnerability and intensely felt grief make her determined pursuit of the truth engrossing. Henderson’s excellent performance offers an emotional anchor even when the storytelling drifts.

Kath’s frailty is amplified by the elemental expanse of the bay. This site that Kath once thought ‘magical’ (as a child, she believed it was the only place in the country where seawater could freeze) becomes the impassive theatre for her mental disquiet. The responsibility for counselling Kath through her grief for her sister lies with local clergyman Noyen (Roshan Seth); eventually, and in spite of the cleric’s dedication to his disabled wife, the pair become increasingly intimate.

Frequent, almost abstract inserts of water trapped under ice act as an appropriate metaphor for Kath’s chilly, emotional stasis. These shots – filmed via an underwater camera by a diver in Arctic Sweden – work rather better than the scenes showing Kath’s figurative visions. The sequences, for instance, showing a red-coated woman walking ominously and just out of reach across a spit in the bay have the stylised sheen, and much of the portentousness, of glossy commercials.

Frozen’s parochialism is its defining strength: the milieu of fish factories, moored trawlers and seafront cafés is memorably cinematic. It is the outside influences and deference to genre conventions that are the film’s partial undoing. The obvious homage to Don’t Look Now is distracting; no more original is the debt to the psychological horrors of Hideo Nakata in the use of CCTV footage.

England’s gloomy north-west coast offers ripe territory for the supernatural thriller, but the more melodramatic turns of Frozen seem unnecessary adornments to its quieter examination of the corrosive anguish of unexplained loss. The viewer is not always trusted to ponder such themes unprompted: often they are emphasised in Noyen’s sombre voiceover. But, despite some awkwardness in its execution, this is a personal, contemplative film, laden with promise and thick with atmosphere.

This review features in the February 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.

Just like Heaven

It seems an extraordinary piece of selling-ice-to-Eskimos good fortune that French novelist Marc Levy secured $2 million from DreamWorks for the rights to his bestselling debut If Only It Were True. The book’s preoccupation with the complications of a romance bridging this world and the next is a longstanding Hollywood staple. In the resulting adaptation, Mark Ruffalo plays the grieving landscape architect David who falls for the less than corporeal charms of Reese Witherspoon’s Elizabeth, the workaholic doctor haunting his new apartment. If Just like Heaven fails to make an enduring impression, this is due to overfamiliarity rather than want of charm.

Directed by Mark Waters (maintaining a solid mainstream track record after 2004’s Mean Girls), Just like Heaven is distinguished by its restraint. Waters creates a credibly spellbound San Francisco, one that is full of sun-streamed windows, misted gardens and clouds pulsing with numinous presence. Magical interventions drive forward the narrative, as when a note advertising Elizabeth’s tragically vacated apartment flies off a message board and pirouettes in the air above David before fluttering down in front of his eyes.

Without recourse to the excessive sentimentality and visual trickery normally de rigueur for the supernatural rom-com, Just like Heaven achieves a modest cinematic alchemy. Special effects are restricted to some mischievous metaphysicality. Backing away from David’s insistence that she is a ghost, Elizabeth is confronted with her ethereality when she finds herself standing in the middle of a table, its wooden surface bisecting her midriff; it is the same effect as used in Joseph L Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

Elizabeth is more blonde control freak than blithe spirit; she harangues David for his slovenly housekeeping, bemoaning the mug rings he leaves on her furniture. But Witherspoon’s is a curiously sober performance, sidelining the demented relish that she brought to Election and Legally Blonde, and claiming few of the opportunities for spectral scene-stealing. This inhibition makes Elizabeth one of cinema’s less spirited apparitions, though her baffled estrangement from the physical world is all the more touching. Having taken pains initially to paint her as a driven professional with little time for dating or social niceties, thankfully the script does not labour her Scroogian spiritual renewal.

Satisfyingly, the dead-to-alive trajectory is as forcefully charted through Ruffalo’s David, who emerges from a chrysalis of mourning to find love again. The momentum of the dual regeneration culminates in a genuinely moving climax, which is only slightly dissipated by the sense of formulaic predetermination. Better jokes would have distracted from this predictability; but, save for a rather incongruous turn from Napoleon Dynamite’s Jon Heder as a mellowed psychic running an occult bookstore, the comedy is left bizarrely untended.

This review features in the December 2005 issue of Sight & Sound.

Room 36

The press notes for Room 36 – a low-budget British noir started in 1994 but not completed until last year – lead actor Paul Herzberg writes an impassioned ode to director Jim Groom’s perseverance in seeing this ‘(potential) little classic’ to the screen. Explaining how Groom determinedly returned to his credit-card-funded labour of love in 2002, Herzberg refers to the director’s ‘Orson Welles moment’. But while Room 36 exudes undoubted film-making zest this is unfortunately besmirched by a proclivity for crudity and misogyny.

The eponymous room is in the seedy Hotel Midlothian, the west London establishment where Richard Armstrong, a repulsive lingerie salesman of Jabba the Hutt amplitude and lasciviousness, awaits hired companionship, while Connor, a ruthless hitman in an adjacent room, prepares for the arrival of the defecting MP he has been assigned to kill. The Midlothian, run by Brian Murphy (a familiar face from TV’s Man about the House and George and Mildred), seems intended almost as a character in its own right, but is rendered in only the broadest strokes – an inventory of clichés typified by the perpetual flicker of the hotel sign. Early establishing shots in the streets around Paddington Station achieve an effective workaday naturalism, so it’s a pity to see this undone by the Midlothian’s hackneyed composite of eerie bed-and-board antecedents.

Groom’s second feature (following 1992’s Revenge of Billy the Kid) undermines quirky Z-grade charm with grubbiness. It aims for the bargain-basement atmospherics of something like Detour (1946), but warps noir misanthropy into smutty English salaciousness. The dearth of likeable characters was never a hindrance for Detour and its ilk, because even the most twisted of protagonists had emotional depth. In Room 36 the repellent Midlothian guests are only ciphers. At the film’s heart is a depressing abhorrence of women, which manifests itself in violent repetition of the words ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’. The authentically noirish black-and-white camerawork, enriched by imaginative framing, seems superficial without complex psychologies.

This slavish mimesis of noir tropes, and the uncanny effect of watching scenes filmed years apart, is reminiscent of Carl Reiner’s noir spoof Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, in which Steve Martin was intercut with vintage genre clips (Herzberg even resembles Martin on the Room 36 poster). But if Reiner’s movie provided witty interplay with the past, Groom’s is merely anachronistic, apparently oblivious to the neo-noirs of Altman, John Dahl and the Coens that make it so redundant.

This review features in the November 2005 issue of Sight & Sound.

The Honeymooners

John Schultz’s The Honeymooners – the new comedy vehicle for Cedric The Entertainer – faces a double obstacle in appealing to UK audiences. The British know its star – if we know him at all – mainly through an uninspiring string of comedy features, the most recent of which, Johnson Family Vacation (2004), bypassed our cinemas for DVD. Similarly, despite its haloed status in the history of US television, the 1950s CBS sitcom that inspired the movie will be unfamiliar to any British viewers who missed its belated run on BBC2 from 1989 to 1991.

An antidote to the prevailing middle-class TV comedies of the era, The Honeymooners was a post-war phenomenon for Americans, who responded enthusiastically to its unique blue-collar milieu and the convincingly volatile and down-to-earth marriage between bus-driving would-be entrepreneur Ralph Kramden and his wife Alice. Elements of the show would be recognisable even for the uninitiated, particularly Jackie Gleason’s iconic personification of Kramden, the bumbling but aspiring everyman and model for countless subsequent sitcom husbands – from Fred Flintstone to Homer Simpson.

Schultz’s film establishes affection for the show with a pre-millennial prologue in which Kramden meets and woos his wife-to-be under effulgent New York lights. Two divergences from the original are explicit. Of these, the switch to an African-American cast is the more radical, while the contemporary update is more expected. The series’ more dated specifics are also ironed out, with the modernisation adroitly avoiding the dubious implications of Kramden’s blustery domestic threat to send Alice ‘to the moon’ (the show’s most famous catch-phrase); it is adapted to a more benign promise of future pastures: ‘I'll take you to the moon, Alice.’

But such a trip occurs neither for Alice nor the viewer. Instead, The Honeymooners oscillates wearingly between scenes of bickering and saccharine reconciliation. The Entertainer is appropriately amiable in the Gleason role, but the script rarely transcends idiocy. After a swift segue to the present day, we find the now-married couple scraping a living in a Brooklyn apartment that reverberates at the passing of trains outside their kitchen. The film would have been boosted by some imaginative art direction here. The sitcom’s sets were defined by their urgent, live-TV austerity; Schultz’s film offers nothing comparable, opening out the action into the city’s streets, sewers and racetracks without acquiring any flavour.

Kramden’s scheme to make money racing an abandoned mutt enables John Leguizamo’s ne’er-do-well dog-trainer Dodge to run away with some of the better lines, but fails to sustain feature-length interest when punctuated only by vapid set pieces. A ball shoots off a pool table hitting a bystander with amplified effect; a bogey is surreptitiously dropped into a trophy at the dog racers’ party; a chicken dinner is secretly smothered with cayenne pepper but then eaten by the wrong person. This is how the film attempts to squeeze laughs from an audience already wishing the honeymoon over.

This review features in the October 2005 issue of Sight & Sound.

The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D

Robert Rodriguez’s The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl is billed as ‘a Rodriguez family movie.’ This highlights its kinship with the director’s previous films for children – the Spy Kids trilogy (2005-03) – and its distinctness from his violent fantasies for teenagers and adults (most recently, Sin City). Equally though, this is a movie by the Rodriguez family: the credits reveal not merely the active participation of various members of the Rodriguez clan, but also that the film was inspired by the ‘stories and dreams’ of the director’s then seven-year-old son, Racer.

The film charts the escapades of an ostracised and wildly fanciful schoolboy after a pair of superheroes fetch him to help restore order to the dream world in which he has conjured them. It inevitably evokes several of its fantasy precursors. Sharkboy, who acquired gills, a fin and an appetite for sushi after his adoption by a shiver of shark that found him lost at sea, fits the mutant-hero archetype of infinite comic books; though his animal parentage – pictured in the film’s opening moments complete with woozy 3D tide effects – echoes also Mowgli’s upbringing in The Jungle Book. Lavagirl, she of the fiery emotions and incinerating touch (‘she’s hot!’ exclaims one of Max’s classmates), is a kindred spirit of Edward Scissorhands: her superhero’s solitude is exacerbated by an inability to hold anything or anybody without causing harm.

Above all, however, it is Dorothy’s adventures in Oz that seem to have provided the template for the film’s ideas. This is not simply a matter of the tornado that bookends Max’s trip into the realm of his subconscious, but also of the displacement of figures from Max’s home life into distorted fantasy form on Planet Drool: significantly, the school teacher who is reimagined by Max as the planet’s frustrated electrician-turned-evil-dictator, Mr Electric. Bent on ridding his domain of dreams and their dreamers, Mr Electric (played by George Lopez) spouts infinite electrical puns as his pursuit of the children escalates with bed-wetting intensity. (‘Watts up?’ he asks Sharkboy mockingly as he unleashes electric eels into the water after him.)

But formal similarities with The Wizard of Oz point to this film’s major flaw. While Oz’s delirious Technicolor contrasted with the drab sepia of Kansas, Rodriguez signposts Max’s world of reverie with the use of 3D. The technology is effective in adding a dreamy sensation to whooshing rollercoasters and cuckoo clocks bursting open with menace, but it creates significant visual problems, too. In the two-dimensional real world, the camera notices the yellow of a climbing frame, the purple of Max’s lava lamp and the fluorescence of Lavagirl’s pink hair; the 3D dream world, on the other hand, seems blanched of such vibrancy, monotonously violet.

This gloom seems apposite for the scene in which Max arrives at Mount Neverest to find his latent utopia plunged into its hellish flip side by Mr Electric’s evildoings: the faces of Max and his fantasy friends are bathed in the suitably infernal glow of nocturnal lights. The trouble is, there is no respite from this oppressive murkiness: the idyllic Land of Milk and Cookies is similarly monochromatic (this time with an anaemic green); the viewer begins to covet the primary tones of ‘reality’.

The virtual gaming sequences in Spy Kids 3-D (2003) were similarly flawed, though in that film the lack of lustre seemed endemic, the flights of fancy lethargic. For Sharkboy and Lavagirl, conversely, Rodriguez has fabricated a vividly imagined and wittily realised dreamscape. And scenes in which the protagonists escape in a banana-split boat down the Stream of Consciousness, or catch a ride on the Train of Thought on its trackless journey in the skies above a brain forest, evince a ripe imagination – whether father or son’s – toiling busily under the dulled veneer.

This review features in the September 2005 issue of Sight & Sound.

Monster-in-law

Few titles declare their film’s high concept as forcibly as Monster-in-law, the latest in what is becoming a cycle of malevolent in-law narratives. Here Jennifer Lopez is subjected to ever more desperate attempts by a demoniacal Jane Fonda to prevent her marrying her son. The transparency of the title might seem an admission of the film’s similarity to predecessors Meet the Parents and Guess Who – and a warning that the idea is wearing thin.

The sense of repetition applies also to the luxuriant Californian milieu in which director Robert Luketic set parts of both his previous films (Legally Blonde and Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!) and in which we now encounter Charlie (Lopez), a self-confessed dabbler with a string of temp jobs. While the early scenes – in which Charlie falls for wealthy doctor Kevin – establish an unexceptional rom-com dynamic, the mise en scène presents an undeniably appealing patina, with a palette of oranges and greens captured by Russell Carpenter’s fluid but restless camerawork. Fortunately, Lopez and Michael Vartan as Kevin are charismatic enough not to be upstaged by the insistent beautification of palm-lined roads and ubiquitous bougainvillea.

Monster-in-law switches gear with the introduction of Kevin’s mother Viola, a recently usurped television anchorwoman, whom we see hosting one last (disastrous) chat-show interview with a dim-witted pop star. Infuriated by this unfortunate’s youthful empty-headedness – she professes a taste for, like, really old movies such as Legally Blonde – the highly strung presenter lunges at her guest. The film lunges with her, taking a bathetic nosedive into OTT characterisation and intermittently absurd physical comedy.

That Viola’s increasingly dogged attempts to ‘save’ her son from marrying beneath him don’t become entirely unwatchable is testament to the panache that Jane Fonda brings to the role of Viola, returning to the screen after a lengthy hiatus and gamely poking fun at her iconic image. She is even happy to don Norma Desmond-like attire for the engagement party scene – fearlessly confronting the close-to-the-bone Sunset Blvd. aspects of her character. The juxtaposition of Fonda with Lopez, now a star of comparable stature, is shrewd, and Luketic lingers in awe on their first scene together with a wordless montage of smiles, glances and good humour as they share a pot of tea in Viola’s garden. This scene seems as much about the two icons as it is about the meeting of Charlie and her prospective mother-in-law.

The chemistry that might have developed between these female leads given wittier material is neglected by the director (who impressed with his eye for gentle satire in Legally Blonde) in favour of interludes of cartoonish violence. While these are often contained within brief eruptions of fantasy (reminiscent of TV’s Ally McBeal), as when Viola visualises plunging Charlie face-first into an iced cake, the comedy comes to rely on such moments at the expense of more sophisticated altercations.

Viola becomes an antagonist of such maniacal determination that it is impossible to believe that she can suddenly accept the couple. Nor can we believe, shortly after Charlie has suffered an anaphylactic reaction to gravy that Viola has spiked with almonds, that she could possibly want her mother-in-law ‘upfront and centre’ in her family. And the relationship between Charlie and Kevin is so weakly established that Charlie’s patience with such near psychotic behaviour seems implausible. In one scene Kevin tenderly describes the nuances of Charlie’s eyes; attentive viewers may recall a similar spiel in Tad Hamilton! in which Tad dupes his young fan into thinking he loves her by listing her array of smiles. A scene that Luketic used originally to expose Tad’s fraudulent romanticism has become the means by which he now attempts to hoodwink his audience.

This review features in the July 2005 issue of Sight & Sound.