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After a disappointing double bill of The Counterfeiters and Death Trip I had higher hopes a week last Monday.
I have very fond memories of Before Sunrise, in which Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke wander around Vienna and try not to fall in love - and I was relieved to find it standing up when I showed it to N, who has wider taste than I often credit him for. Before Sunset was more of the same, a decade on and in Paris, and adds did-they/didn't-they? to will-they/won't-they? I didn't love it as much - we've seen it - but I hope they do Before Midnight and Before Noon in due course, and I must watch Waking Life which sort of features the same characters.
Back in the day Spielberg screwed up and actually made a decent movie, Empire of the Sun, with an unknown child star Christian Bale. He's made the difficult transition from child to adult actor, and whilst he's not one of those actors I go out of may way to see, The Machinist and The Prestige are both pretty impression. Now him out of Billy Eliot - a film I had problems with - is following in his footsteps.
Whilst I'm catching up, I should mention
I have very fond memories of Before Sunrise, in which Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke wander around Vienna and try not to fall in love - and I was relieved to find it standing up when I showed it to N, who has wider taste than I often credit him for. Before Sunset was more of the same, a decade on and in Paris, and adds did-they/didn't-they? to will-they/won't-they? I didn't love it as much - we've seen it - but I hope they do Before Midnight and Before Noon in due course, and I must watch Waking Life which sort of features the same characters.
Two Days in Paris brings Delpy's scripting skills - she had input into the earlier films - to her own story, which treads the familiar ground of neurotic American encountering liberated Parisian, with Hawke replaced by sitcom actor Adam Goldberg. Goldberg is an earthier presence than Hawke, and perhaps rather less able to cope with being ina strange environment. Goldberg and Delpy call in on her family as they return to America from a European trip, and encounter both her family, and her life and relationships before their relationship.
Delpy is as much a joy to watch as ever - and since she also directs, edits, provides the music and casts her family, this is just as well as it stands or falls by her. I think it stood.
Delpy is as much a joy to watch as ever - and since she also directs, edits, provides the music and casts her family, this is just as well as it stands or falls by her. I think it stood.
Back in the day Spielberg screwed up and actually made a decent movie, Empire of the Sun, with an unknown child star Christian Bale. He's made the difficult transition from child to adult actor, and whilst he's not one of those actors I go out of may way to see, The Machinist and The Prestige are both pretty impression. Now him out of Billy Eliot - a film I had problems with - is following in his footsteps.
Hallam Foe sees Jamie Bell still at the man-boy stage, and is a flawed psychological thriller. Foe's mother has drowned, and he suspect his dad's new wife murdered her. Confronting her with this, she seduces him, and he runs off to Edinburgh where he bumps into a hotel PR manager who is the spitting image of his mother. Having first spied on her from the rooftops, he gets a job at the hotel and sets about getting to know her. This is an incredibly perverse film - voyeurism, scopophilia, fetishism, cross-dressing, necrophilia, incest, and a large dollop of Oedipus (his father even starts going around on crutches, Oedipus meaning "swollen foot").
It is endlessly fascinating, although the climax asks us to swallow first an act of melodrama, and then that everything can be brushed under the carpet. It's based on a book, and I think I need to go away and read that to see if it's rather more subtle. Recommended.
It is endlessly fascinating, although the climax asks us to swallow first an act of melodrama, and then that everything can be brushed under the carpet. It's based on a book, and I think I need to go away and read that to see if it's rather more subtle. Recommended.
Whilst I'm catching up, I should mention
Black Sheep, a horror film in the tradition of Shaun of the Dead, but as a film made in New Zealand it owes much to the days when Peter Jackson hadn't sold out. Years after the death of his father, a younger brother returns home to sell his share of his farm to his older sibling, and to confront his ghosts and fear of sheep. Unfortunately hisbrother has been genetically engineering sheep. If you can swallow all the mutating DNA nonsense in Doctor Who you'll have no problems, and it's all good fun - perhaps the trailer has the funniest lines though. Not as clever as it thinks, but pleasant enough. For comedy horror.
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