David recommends . . . THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT, CARLOS, and BURKE AND HARE

Best film this week, if flawed, is the witty and intelligent THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT. We're in LA. Julianne Moore and Annette Bening are married lesbians, neither in the first flush of youth, very much in love but with tensions emerging in the relationship.  We know they are lesbians because Julianne wears no make up and sports chunky safari shorts, and Annette has short, slightly spiky hair. And because their sexual orientation is referred to about every 30 seconds. 

Each has a child, product of the same anonymous donor's sperm. Joni, 18, named after Joni Mitchell (geddit? ma is a lesbian).  "OMG I'm eighteeeeen, you have to let me make my own decisiooooons!". And the intriguingly named Laser (boy), 15 and all surging testosterone and moods.

Secretly the kids trace their donor Dad, Paul, and the fun starts. Cue Mark Ruffalo, an actor with much in common with Tony Blair: they both used to be the future.  Ruffalo turns in an excellent performance which makes clear he should have been doing more comedy back when his career nosedived. 

Is Paul a charming, right-on guy? After all he runs an organic vegetable nursery and his own restaurant. But cooking is the single best-known way to get into a lady's pants. So is he a preening narcissist who uses women? We are left in no doubt Paul is hotttt. First, we get to see his hairy chest throughout the movie. Second, the much younger woman at the nursery clearly longs for him. It's OK, it's not sexist cos she's a white chick with dreadlocks. Third, the much younger woman at the restaurant is sleeping with him. It's OK, it's not sexist cos she's a black chick with an impressively retro Afro hairdo - Angela Davis style.

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT is great for people who like sitting around dinner tables discussing the wine and being witty. Because it's full of people having dinner and discussing the wine and being witty. Think Woody Allen, if his skin could handle the LA sun.  

It's the sort of film Hollywood does very well, but not often enough these days. Harking back to the screwball comedies and 'social comedies' (Preston Sturges) of the 30s. Via genuine comedy serious issues are raised and discussed - sexual orientation, diverse families, sperm donation and the needs of the offspring, confidentiality, parenthood and adolescents, desire versus honesty. Think how appalling that would be if done without the humour.

Sister: "He donated sperm - that's, like, weird!"

Brother: "But if he hadn't, we wouldn't be here. So - respect."

But the film loses its way a little in the Third Act when suddenly it goes all earnest, letting go the wit for drama and emotion. And another flaw is to drop a major character somewhere before the traditional Hollywood resolution. But once you've seen the film you can ask whether that jettisoning is in fact the subliminal message of the film's social commentary. Answers on a postcard please.

Some may question why two lesbians get played by straight actresses. I guess Ellen Degeneres is not pretty enough, and Anne Heche has gone back to the Boy Side.  But Moore and Bening deserve Oscar nominations for performances whose excellence ranges across both the comedy and the rising emotional tension of the piece. This is Bening's strongest outing since American Beauty and Moore is as good as, well, always. Maybe they can share Best Actress?

For CARLOS we turn to our guest reviewer, Simon King, who is Lecturer in Visual Culture at the University of Arts in London.  Simon saw CARLOS for us and then answered our questions about this Biopic of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, aka 70s terrorist Carlos the Jackal.

Before we go further you need to know there are two versions doing the rounds.  There's the 2 hours 45 minutes version for softies. Or the 'extended version' at 6 hours 34. If you pick a screening with a break and some Q&A you are looking at an 8 hour experience (take a cushion).

DAVID RECOMMENDS:  Give us your 25 word summary.

SIMON:  It's one part Mesrine and two parts Baader Meinhoff Complex, liberally sprinkled with The Life of Brian, then simmer for several hours.

DAVID RECOMMENDS:  Life of Brian?

SIMON: There's a slightly absurd element.  Carlos is not actually very successful.  He gets the nom de guerre of Carlos the Jackal because he is busted in London and the cops find the novel Day of the Jackal.  

Philip French says he is a Scarlet Pimpernel character.  The Bin Laden of his day - seen as behind all outrages, but actually was not.  Always aiming at spectacular coups de theatre - but many actually go wrong.  Partly because he's working with a bunch of disparate and unhinged Left wing groups - with those interchangeable names ridiculed in Life of Brian.  

In the end he gets past his sell-by date and is shunted from country to country.  The 1975 killing of a Libyan delegate at OPEC haunts him for the rest of life.  So Libya won't harbour him.  

DAVID RECOMMENDS:  So would you recommend it?

SIMON:  Definitely. It's very well done indeed.  The viewer is immersed into that very different world. It seems extraordinary now that Carlos and pals keep getting away with amazing political blags.  There's a couple of great set pieces - the OPEC kidnapping in Vienna - that just would not happen now because of advances in hardware and surveillance.  So very relevant to the modern era, and political nostalgia at the same time.

Edgar Ramirez as Carlos gives an extraordinarily compelling performance.  A truthful performance.  At times he enables a faint identification.  Someone taking on the Establishment.  A Robin Hood figure.  At times I wanted to root for him.

DAVID RECOMMENDS:  Is he played as a hero? You mention the French biopic, Mesrine. (French bank robber and murderer, played by Vincent Cassel.) Those films display the cold brutality of Jacques Mesrine and yet there is no doubt he is portrayed as a hero, cleverly and audaciously outwitting the bumbling cops at every turn. Perhaps aimed at the disaffected youth of the Banlieu. Is there a moral ambiguity in CARLOS?

SIMON:  There is no moral confusion. He stands against the Establishment, but I was not seduced at all.  At the height of his powers Carlos explicitly imitated Che Guevara.  In love with own publicity -  presenting himself as an outlaw figure.  In the film Carlos is good looking and seductive.  But he is a bit of an idiot.  Spouting soundbites like "guns are an extension of my body".  A psychopathic idiot. 

And now to BURKE AND HARE, a film which is much better than the sniffy reviews it is getting. 

The Times gave it 2 out of 5, referring condescendingly to the Carry On films. BURKE AND HARE is both better and worse than that, if you know what I mean.  High production values, and excellent design and photography make this rollicking comedy one of the best-looking British films I have seen in a long time.

But most of all it is funny.  The tale of two grave robbers who morph into murderers zips along at an excellent pace. The comedy combines intelligent wit, social comment regarding both the 1830s and the present day, and no opportunity for a sick gag about death or corpses is overlooked.  This is good, black humour.  And it does sit well in the great British tradition of popular comedy. It is in fact an Ealing Studios production, and does not shy away from taking on that heritage. 

Simon Pegg as Burke continues to establish his credentials as a serious actor in an understated performance. Which leaves the space for Andy 'Gollum' Serkis to push the envelope in the more outlandishly comedic role of Hare.  Especially in one of the funniest sex scenes in cinema history.  One which asks questions about today's worship of money.  

Australia's pocket sweetheart Isla Fisher - surely the best contemporary comic film actress - puts in a decent shift as the strumpet / thespienne trying to put on an all-women version of The Scottish Play.  And the three leads are backed up by a long list of British actors, comedians and celebrities to provide enjoyment just spotting and naming them. Another aspect in the great Ealing tradition.  Just wait to see who runs into a coach-related disaster.

BURKE AND HARE lacks the sophistication of THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT. But it is an excellent and very funny piece of traditional British film comedy brought up to date via Pegg's now standardly fine input. Don't be put off by bad reviews. It's fun.

David recommends . . . . go and see FORBIDDEN PLANET at Dulwich Picture Gallery Monday 18th October 2010

FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956, USA, 98 mins, Cert U)

1950s pulp sci-fi classic as Shakespeare meets spacemen meets Freud

Monday 18th October 7.15 for 7.45pm in the Linbury Room, Dulwich Picture Gallery

£8 (£6 for Friends of the Gallery)  Free nibbles and wine.  Google SE21 7AD for map.

In 1609 the Sea Venture set off from Plymouth as flagship of a small fleet bringing supplies and new migrants to the first successful English colony in the Americas, Jamestown. The ship was severely damaged in a violent tempest and deliberately driven onto a Bermuda reef to save it from sinking. Crew and passengers spent 9 months on that exotic island while their ship was repaired, before finally making it to Jamestown. And then the ship back to England.

This adventure was the biggest news story since the defeat of the Spanish Armada twenty years earlier. It captured the imagination of Jacobean England, including one William Shakespeare. 

To his contemporaries, America was a fantasy land offering riches and a new future. Much was written by wildly imaginative writers who had never set foot there. The Americas became for the 17th Century English a socially constructed fantasy of dreamlike possibilities. But combined with danger.  For Jamestown was the 12th English attempt to start a permanent colony on the land they called Virginia.  A majority of the souls who took part in the previous 11 efforts died - drowned, starved, or killed by the indigenous inhabitants. Virginia meant adventure and anticipated wealth, but also danger.  

Which is where Shakespeare and Forbidden Planet explore the same themes - psychological ambivalence.  

Most Americans today do not have a passport. Apart from day trips to Canada or Mexico only a small minority travels abroad. So abroad can seem an alien, scary place, as often represented in Hollywood films. Large numbers of Americans left their continent and found death,in 1917-18 and in 1941-46. Forbidden Planet was released 10 years after the War in the Pacific, and just 3 years after the Korean War ended.  And at the height of fears of Soviet invasion.  Not to mention Martian invasion. A new generation is now finding, in Iraq and Afghanistan, that exploration and the pursuit of gold are mortally dangerous.

The ambivalence of excitement versus danger begins in both The Tempest and Forbidden Planet with this geographical exploration. Forbidden Planet starts with the characters of The Tempest, and with its opening situation. A spaceship is sent to a planet to search for colonists not heard from for 20 years. 

Doctor Morbius is Prospero, enabling an update of Shakespeare's question about a second form of ambivalence: science. Can the exploration for new knowledge go too far? Prospero and Morbius use science to do good, but can they unwittingly do evil? Shakespeare wrote when the Renaissance was a hundred years old. But with the Scientific Revolution still a hundred years ahead. And the burning of women as witches in between. 

Forbidden Planet was released not long after the scientific horror of Hiroshima, and the scientific industrialisation of death at Auschwitz. And with worries about global warming, nuclear power, and GM crops lying ahead in the future.

Hence our third level of ambivalence - the psychologically deepest of all. Are humans good or bad? 

The Tempest's characters can be placed on a continuum from good to evil. Prospero and Morbius both have sweet, innocent, virginal daughters. Reflecting the Jacobean assumption that the natives of Virginia would be innocent, 'noble savages'. The 'natural' versus the civilised, including science. Prospero's helpful spirit Ariel has become Robby the Robot. In the middle of the continuum are the ambivalent figures of the two magician-scientists.  But what about the far end of the scale- Evil?

The most interesting character in The Tempest is Caliban,a  hideous, deformed monster. Not just evil but the son of evil, begotten by a witch. And confined by Prospero in a tree, repflecting the socially necessary suppression of our dark side. For Caliban expresses the dark side of nature / The New World / space. And of us, humans. Who is Caliban in Forbidden Planet? The film takes a thoroughly 20th Century route to answer this question.  And contemporary ones: how can we ensure we do good rather than evil?

David recommends . . . go and see WINTER'S BONE

Hot on the heels of MADE IN DAGENHAM comes a much better film about female self-empowerment.

Ree Dolly is just 17, her father Jessop has "gone" and Momma is "sick" and "don't talk much". Which means Ree has to bring up her brother and sister (12 and 8) as well as take care of Momma.  All this happens amid the tree-clad and beautiful Ozark mountains of rural Missouri.  

Culturally, if not geographically, the Ozarks are an extension of the Appalachian back hills of Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia.  All double denim, checked shirts, unemployment and family feuds. "Cooking up crank" is both a popular local lifestyle choice and cottage industry.

This is real poverty.  The horse has not been fed for 4 days. Ree has to teach the young siblings how to use a rifle. Then how to skin squirrels and prepare them for the pot. Turns out later that being able to cut up dead things comes in handy in them thar hills.

The Sheriff is looking for Ree's father who is due in court next week but cannot be found. He explains that the terms of Poppa's bail bond mean if he fails to turn up then the family will lose their house and land. "We'll have to live in the mud!!" No namby-pamby social safety net in this Cameronian-Cleggian free market paradise.

So we are perfectly set up for a Quest Film, one of the half dozen or so basic plots. For young Ree sets off wandering round the neighbours and extended family to ask if they've seen the errant dad. And a mystery emerges. Asking questions is not encouraged among the local community. "Talking just causes witnesses". "You were warned, why didntcha listen?". Something suspicious is going on. To find out what, you have to see the film.

Jennifer Lawrence is excellent as Ree.  And this is so much more of a "women's film" than the faux left-leaning Made in Dagenham, for at the helm is celebrated young Director and co-Writer Debra Granik. 

WINTER'S BONE won the 2010 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize, which establishes it's Indie credentials. Independent US cinema, as encouraged by Sundance, challenges the myth of many Europeans that all American films are dumb mass-audience fodder. WINTER'S BONE is an intelligent and thoughtful piece. It provides mystery and suspense without a single car chase, gunfight, or gag.  And the autumnal Ozark countryside is atmospheric and beautiful.

David recommends . . . don't believe the hype about MADE IN DAGENHAM

MID will be an enormous box office success. The reasons are very simple.


1.  It's about wimmin, nay working-class wimmin, empowering themselves against discrimination. So millions of women will go see it.


2.  There is a new law, apparently, that all reviews of MID have to refer to it as a "feel-good movie". So that whole Richard Curtis "I wanna feel-good!!!" crowd will be queuing fast.


3.  It portrays trades unions and strike action in a positive light. So everyone on the Left will go and see it, especially given the New Dawn of Edism.  This, combined with 1, will draw in millions of right on men.


4.  It's a British movie which has been massively hyped. This will bring in all those who (a) are desperate for the UK film industry to do well (despite making crap films) and / or (b) hate American blockbusters.


5.  It's set in the 60s so will draw in herds of 60s nostalgia fetishists, irrespective of whether it accurately reflects the 60s. (See "The Boat That Rocked")


6.  Everyone covered under 1 to 5 will fall for the hype and tell all their friends it is "the best movie ever made", "it's really really feel-good!!!" etc.  Bringing in even more millions.


7.  It's got Sally Hawkins in it, who gurned her way, appallingly, through previous bad British film HAPPY-GO-LUCKY (bit like "feel-good" - are you getting the picture?). And there's another new law that she has to be promoted as (a) a wonderful new talent and (b) the future of the now-being-reborn UK film industry.


In other words it's a triumph of marketing that will be studied in business schools for many years to come. It illustrates the difference between advertising and marketing. The latter meaning you plan for what demographics (see 1 to 6 above) you are going to sell to BEFORE you even design the product. Which means YOU are being manipulated even as you consider - for no longer then 3 seconds probably - whether to go and see it.


Since I'm already clearly biased, here's a few snippets from a couple of the less hysterical user reviews on imdb.com. And note that these are quotes from what are positive reviews overall.


"The film has all the look and feel of a TV movie and is utterly predictable in its mix of humour and tragedy."


"The movie is set in May/June 1968 and it's a pity more care wasn't taken to ensure the period detail was spot on."


"All the ingredients of a British feelgood movie are there but the overall effect is somewhat spoilt by the tendency to portray all the male authority figures as buffoons."


"It's just a pity that in portraying the women as strong salt-of-the-earth characters, the men have to be seen as caricatures."


"This is big screen TV material. A bit of humour; a bit of heart-string tugging; a bit of stereotyping; a bit of costume drama, a bit of vintage vehicle spotting; a bit of real life documentary; a bit of 'celebrity star' spotting - actors playing roles you wouldn't think they'd take; a bit of flesh baring, a bit of social comment; a bit of this and everything else so as no one feels left out. Trouble is, this makes it a Jack & Jill of all trades and master/mistress of none".


"It is, at the end of the day, a superficial treatment of a ground breaking industrial dispute."


Or how about rottentomatoes.com?


"It’s jolly stuff, yet for all the bawdy banter, there’s a Boat That Rocked-like sense of a genuinely interesting moment being regurgitated as a cuddly sitcom."


"I'm not saying Made In Dagenham is a shallow piece of nostalgic fluff. But within five minutes, Bob Hoskins is singing My Old Man Said Follow The Van during a power cut."


The comments about the male characters are perhaps the most subtly significant. Basically, it's a chick flick.  As a few minutes spent watching TV advertising will reveal, marketers sell to men using sex, and to women by portraying men as stupid.


That is perhaps the ultimate irony. A film promoted as about women's self-empowerment will make millions by manipulating women. The film clearly (some would say, rather obviously) reveals women's oppression by capitalism as workers. Less obviously it reflects how women are oppressed by capitalists as consumers.  I wonder what Naomi 'No Logo' Klein would have to say?

David recommends . . . FORBIDDEN PLANET at Dulwich Picture Gallery (18 Oct) and THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED

Shakespeare meets Sci-Fi in this 1950's pulp classic.

In 1609 the Sea Venture set off from Plymouth as flagship of a small fleet delivering supplies and bringing new migrants to the first successful English colony in the Americas, Jamestown in Virginia. Separated in a violent storm, the Sea Venture was severely damaged and deliberately driven onto a Bermuda reef to save it from sinking. Crew and passengers spent 9 months on the exotic island while their ship was repaired, before finally making it to Jamestown.

The story of this adventure captured the imagination of Jacobean England. Including one William Shakespeare, the tale influencing The Tempest. To the contemporary English, America was a fantasy land offering riches and a new future for settlers and the nation alike. Much was written about the continent by wildly imaginative writers who had never set foot there. Thus the Americas became for the 17th Century English a social fantasy of dreamlike possibilities combined with alien dangers.

A bit like space exploration for the generations of 1950s America.  Forbidden Planets starts with the characters of The Tempest, and with its' opening situation. A group are (space)shipwrecked and meet some people who've been there longer. Doctor Morbius is Prospero, enabling an update of Shakespeare's exploration of the dangers of science - can it go too far!?  His innocent daughter Altaira enables the 17th century consideration of nature versus civilisation, so inspired by the American discoveries.  She has never been kissed, and now there are hunky spacemen around! Helpful spirit Ariel has become Robby the Robot. And who now is the deformed monster and witch's son, Caliban? Representing the dark side of nature / The New World / space? Well, you have to watch the film to find that out.



Serious fans of Shakespeare should not come to this movie expecting a deep, intellectually stimulating version of his play. Forbidden Planet is, ultimately, pulp science fiction. But what it captures in updated, 20th Century form is the atmosphere of exploration, and the ambivalent feelings about discovering the new and unknown. From 1609 Bermuda via Prospero's island to space in the 23rd Century Shakespeare's original themes are explored in an undoubtedly interesting manner.

That is largely because of an intellectual influence on the script even more important than Shakespeare, that of psychoanalysis. Freud's theories about the unconscious were popular in Hollywood scriptwriting circles in the 1940s and 1950s.  It was common for films of the period to explore the significance in life and society of darker, unconscious motivations, So the real updating in Forbidden Planet goes beyond space and future and explores what it means to be human given Freud's discovery of the unconscious. What it means to us, now, the contemporary audience.

So, in short, Forbidden Planet is NOT a serious version of Shakespeare. But it is a lot of fun and does explore some of the Tempest's themes in a contemporary context.

More event details at http://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/whats_on/galleryfilm/forbidden_planet.aspx


I went to see THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED as it was the only show in town. Normally I avoid contemporary British films. Too derivative, too much film studies, too many zombies or gangstas, posh people in mews cottages. And don't even start me on serial Cinema Criminals Guy 'Geezer' Ritchie and Richard 'which US actress is available to play opposite Colin Fith and / or Hugh Grant' Curtis.

And a short while into ALICE CREED I began wondering what the hell will women think and feel who watch this? And do we really need yet another WIP movie - Woman In Peril? For the opening sequence is stunning in it's creation of a sense of menace. Two grim, unsmiling men appear to be collecting materials for some DIY. Then it becomes clear they are preparing a dungeon. Fully sealed off from the outside world and with plenty of chains and locks.

Soon enough it gets worse. Alice Creed is kidnapped and chained up.  Scissors appear and her clothes are systematically cut off. The tension is almost unbearable as her naked body suggests a new sexual element of menace.

But this is not a routine WIP movie, nor a routine movie of any sort. A series of plot twists appears which are genuinely suprising. All sorts of the audience's assumptions about the characters' identities and motivations prove incorrect. Let's just say that Alice is not a passive victim. This is a truly intelligent suspense movie which will entertain those capable of managing the claustrophobic tension and menace. For most of the action takes place in just two rooms.

A most interesting aspect of the film is its' cast list of just three - Alice and the kidnappers. My first experience of Gemma Arterton left me disappointed. Did not meet the expectation left with me by the Guardian headline "The vertiginous rise of Gemma Arterton". She does a good job when Alice has to look scared, nay terrified. But once she opens her mouth it's like yet more mockney / posh girl's school standard modern Britfilm chickspeak. (See my previous piece about Rachel Weisz.) As a millionaire's daughter one expects some aristo vowels, but we get sentences like "I thought I was going to (posh accent so far) DOIY!!!"

The strongest performance is that of experienced British character actor, Eddie Marsan, as the long-time pro criminal, Vic. All tension and threat and tattoos. But revealing other sides to a 3 dimensional character. And providing an unexpected contribution to the ending.  Give him an award.

The other star of the film is the editing, contributing majorly to the film's tension and menace. By jump-cutting within takes we seem to accelerate horribly towards that which we fear is going to happen. In similar fashion the inventive sound editing jumps brutally at times from silence to sudden noise.

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED is not suitable for those of you seeking a relaxing 90 minutes. Or those recently released from kidnap. It is a very well-writted and dramatic thriller which will keep you engaged and looking for the next plot twist.

David recommends . . . THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES, and PIRANHA 3D, and THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE

Film of the week won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film - Argentine crime procedural THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES. It's Inspector Morse meets Love in the Time of Cholera.  It's 1999 and Esposito, a Federal justice agent, is writing up as a novel a rape-murder case he investigated back in 1974. So lots of flashbacks and forwards. 

There's alcoholic comedy and shades of Bad Boys from sidekick Sandoval. And a romantic sub plot that runs alongside the mystery and then suddenly it's, um, not a subplot any more. Finally, as it's the 70s we are not far away from military rule. So there's a political subplot guaranteeing lots of genuinely surprising twists and turns.

Argentine cinema is where it's happening at the moment, and this is a great example. Reminscent of the best of Golden Era Hollywood, an intelligent mystery story interweaved with comedy, romance and social comment. And all beautifully filmed. Do not miss it.

Runner up features a terrifying and repulsive species that hunts in large numbers and destroys all in its' path. That's right, American teenagers. Luckily thousands of them get dismembered, killed, or just chewed up a bit in PIRANHA 3D.

It's Spring Break on Lake Somethingorother, USA, and vast swathes of semi-naked youth are partaying all night and day. Cute MILF sheriff Elizabeth Shue from Leaving Las Vegas just can't keep them under control. So when the revived pre-historic killer fish come round hungrily looking for lunch it's kind of a shame they just laugh when she screams "Get outta the water!!!" 

Not a shame for the audience though. As PIRANHA 3D is a fine example of its' genre - gore fest meets teens in peril. They don't often make exploitation movies as good as this any more. So if you like lots of death, blood and mangled bodies don't miss it. The body mangling special effects are great. While many of the obnoxious teens are, of course killed, quite a few are only half eaten. Can't wait to see the Making Of to find out how they did the scenes with kids with only head and torso left and still talking. Cool!

Rarely has so much screen time been filled with attractive young women gyrating in bikinis. Far more than the plot strictly demands. Ditto when England's sweetheart and underwear model Kelly Brook gets her kit off with a fellow porn actress for some tasteful crypto-lesbian underwater swimming shots. The camera does not so much linger as loiter with intent. But don't worry, it's all feminist really as there is an excellent, um, climax involving a porn director's penis.

PIRANHA 3D is really, really, really funny. I was wincing the whole way through.

Bronze goes to THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, second in the Stieg Larsson trilogy. Bottom line is it's not a patch on the first one ( . . . With the Dragon Tattoo), but still a decent mystery thriller.  If you've read the book you'll inevitably say it's a disappointment. And if you've not seen the first one, you really have to go and see the first one, first. It's even darker than it's excellent predecessor, with greater focus on Lisbeth Salander's tortured psychology and more details of the grim childhood which was the cause. 

Noomi Rapace's extraordinary performance as the eponymous heroine is worth the admission price alone. An astonishing display of brooding paranoia and hate. An injured, scared and angry animal coiled to strike. Imagine the kick-ass action capability of Angelina Jolie combined with the sheer emotional suffering of an on-form and ultra-miserable Juliette Binoche. All the more amazing given that Rapace hardly has any words to say. A masterclass (mistressclass?) in movie acting - all dark eyes and terse facial expressions in close up.  Being and feeling, rather than acting.

When she's not around it's a bit clunky to tell the truth. Lisbeth and Blomqvist are hardly on screen together, so their combined chemistry of the first film is just not there. And the film has an annoying habit common to movie adaptations of crime novels. We keep being given information - tons of it - via various pairs of people meeting up and one telling the other loads of stuff. So at times the movie seems to comprise scenes like that interspersed with people traveling to meet someone for another scene like that. "Show it, don't tell it" is one of the basic rules of good scriptwriting, and this film at times shows why.

But THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE is still a good thriller and one of the best films on release at the moment.

David recommends ... DON'T BOTHER with GAINSBOURG, INCEPTION, or KARATE KID

Three films which argue the case for immediate legislation to ban movies over 2 hours long.  Come on Coalition.

Not much for the art movie crowd on general release at the mo, so many will be tempted by the over-long and plodding GAINSBOURG. No one split the French public like Serge G, and this biopic fails fully to demonstrate why. 

On the one hand a talented polymath - artist, pianist, guitarist and songwriter, then singer - and above all a musical innovator. On the other hand a troubled and repulsive man, his life dominated not just by alcoholic excess but by an increasingly embarrassing obsession with sex. Manifested in a bizarrely successful interest in younger and younger women and in tacky, tastelessly prurient song lyrics. French women divide into those who loathe him for his sexual expressions and those who wanted to sleep with him.

Eric Elmosnino is superb as the adult Lucien, name changed because he was told it "sounds like hairdresser's boy". He takes Lucien / Serge from shy young man hamstrung by lack of confidence in his looks to hideously slimy, alcoholic lounge lizard. But even this massive performance cannot save what is just a boring and unsatisfying film. 

It fails as drama, falling into the biopic trap of trying to show too much of the subject's life. It fails as explanation, despite some cod Freud and a half-assed Terry Gilliamesque device - a character wearing a large papier mache head with an enormous nose. meant to reflect Gainsbourg's preoccupation with Jewishness, looks and being an outsider. 

It also fails in honesty. In racking up a record number of cliches - artist as precocious, different, outsider, troubled, special, rebel etc. yawn - it falls into the trap of liking the subject too much and downplaying his downside.  Innocent 16 year-old singer France Gall was persuaded to record a song he wrote for her about a girl who likes lollipops. She and her agent father failed to realise that the song was but a string of references to oral sex. Apart from being crassly vulgar, this almost destroyed her career, and blighted it for years. In the film the episode is treated as a boyish prank by a charming 60s rebel.

It is that 'rebel' persona which is most offensive in the film and accounts for much of the adoration of Gainsbourg by millions of his compatriots. French culture could not handle the youth and music revolution of the 60s, tied up as it was with Anglo-American blues-based pop and rock.  How could young French people express themselves in a music culture dominated by slow, miserable ballads and jaunty, Django Rheinhardt jazz? 

Johnny Halliday, Sylvie Vartan and France Gall tried to imitate cross-Atlantic pop and rock with French lyrics and French accents. Others stayed stuck in national musical traditions left somewhere between the wars.

Gainsbourg began in traditional style - ballads or Django guitar.  In the mid 60s he joined the "ye ye" pop movement of Vartan and Gall. But soon became France's foremost popular music innovator. Experimenting, synthesising, taking genres from all over the world and mixing them up. Constantly trying new things.


Was it any good? Not to anyone outside of France, lol! But for hip young French people Gainsbourg offered a vehicle to differentiate themselves from their parents while also asserting a national identity separate from the Anglo-Americo-Saxons.  And as Gainsbourg slept with Bardot and Birkin, drank too much, and ignored sexual mores he became a rebel icon. 


But French society has remained far more conservative than those of the US or the UK. So it does not take much to be a rebel on that side of the Channel. On this side the 'scandal' of Gainsbourg's reggae version of La Marseillaise - "Aux Armes, Etcetera" - just seems naff. In the movie he screams at protestors, "I am a rebel, and this is a rebel song!"  


In fact it was a revolutionary song. Revolutionaries change things. Singers who smoke too much and drink themselves to death change nothing. Rebel Without A Point.

INCEPTION is promoted as intelligent sci-fi meets gripping action but it is just vacuously over complicated, over long, and boring. The script, which apparently took 10 years to develop, commits the ultimate Crime Against Cinema by failing to develop its' characters in the first half. And in some cases, not at all.  For over an hour I just did not care about the characters enough to try and understand what was going on.  By then it was too late.

It must be a first in DiCaprio's career to play a character so unable to generate empathy or interest. He is flat, one-dimensonal. A sub-plot about his wife - is she alive, dead, a figment of imagination? - only begins to take off after an hour or so. By which point I did not care.  A criminal misuse of the best thespian in the piece, the sublime Marion Cotillard. Apparently willing to be in any old crap to make it in Hollywood.  All other characters are entirely lacking in any personality whatsoever.  Cardboard cut outs.

The story completely failed to make me suspend my disbelief, so I will not test the reader with it in detail. One capitalist wants to manipulate another capitalist (are you caring?) and employs Leo's team to enter into the target's dreams and implant an idea (do you believe?) which will destroy his commercial empire and leave the client dominant in the market place. The rest is crap science and sub-Bourne action.

Stick with The Matrix and Total Recall.

Finally KARATE KID is, you guessed, over-long and boring. Beautifully shot, it succeeds well in its' primary purpose as an advert for China as tourism destination.  And does quite well in its' subliminal role to portray China as modern, commercial, high-tech country full of brand new cars and no hint of human rights violations.

As for the rest, it's that Dr Johnson review all over again. It is "both good and original; unfortunately the good parts are not original and the original parts are not good". 

The original Karate Kid is one of the best coming-of-age movies ever made. The relationship between fatherless, bullied boy and damaged old Japanese drunk, Mr Miyagi, displays great psychological depth, taking the film to an almost spiritual level.

In this sequel the story is entirely unchanged. But in another Crime Against Cinema they have omitted the totemic "wax on, wax off" sequence and line, which provided the entire basis of both the Myagi method and the metaphor of how younger males can, should and sometimes do learn from older men.  Robert Bly's "Iron John" made flesh (OK, celluloid) and a text book for the gender-role re-negotiations of our times.

This time round the kid's journey to Kung Fu champion (it's not Karate any more) in just one week is entirely unbelievable. Especially so as newcomer and instant star Jaden Smith is incredibly good at it. Jackie Chan's damaged, alcoholic mentor has him take his jacket off and put it back on for a few days and suddenly young Jaden can do all the moves and at miraculous speed. Just silly.

Chan bravely attempts a deeper, darker persona than in his career so far, and does not entirely succeed. But A for effort and keep it up. Meanwhile Jaden Smith is superb is all aspects - action, comedy, being cute - but then with two Hollywood A-list parents his stardom will hardly be a surprise.

A last word for the character of Jaden's screen mother.  A cringe-makingly embarrassing stereotype of  The African-American Mother. Not since Gone With the Wind have we seen such lawdy eye rolling.  The nearest this re-make gets to the psychological depth of the original is a subtle, even subliminal put-down of that stereotype. In the absence of Jaden's deceased father she cannot get her boy to hang up his jacket; male mentor Chan can. But she will be box office gold, as no one laughed louder in the Camden Odeon at her antics than the Black British women in the audience.