Film Fanatics: September 2001
by
News and Reviews
- Alec Baldwin's spokesman has apparently declined to comment on allegations about the actor's involvement in an incident of 'road rage'. Bonnie Lewis and fellow para-legal Heather Hanna, both from Manhattan, have claimed that Baldwin cut them up in his black Land Rover Discovery, before 'menacing' them and trying to push them off the road. It is not yet clear whether they intend to file charges or not.
- Mariah Carey's recent breakdown has resulted in the US release date for her debut movie Glitter, co-starring British actor Max Beesley, being moved back by three weeks. Instead of the scheduled 31st August opening, Fox have pushed it to 21st September, by which time everyone is hoping Mariah will be well enough to promote the film herself.
- "Money, money, money..." The bankruptcy proceedings for Dana Giacchetto, 'disgraced and imprisoned celebrity financier', continue to yield more information. Just some of the Hollywood clients whose accounts Giacchetto apparently looted are Courtney Cox, who lost $500,000, Ben Stiller ($250,000) and Tobey Maguire ($150,000). It is also thought that baby faced star Leonardo Di Caprio might have lost as much as $10 million!
THE PAROLE OFFICER (12)
Steve Coogan plays a hapless probation officer who 'tangles with some Manchester villains, gets framed for murder by a bent policeman, and then has to orchestrate a bank raid to prove his innocence'.
The Times (Part 2): "It's slightly irritating that The Parole Officer is a crime-based caper (America is going to end up assuming that our culture is more lawless than their own) and at times the humour becomes tediously lavatorial. Moreover, it has to be said that aura of [the film] is definitely more "televisual" and local than it is cinematic and international. ...However, overall, Coogan seems to be using The Parole Officer to assess his own comic boundaries, which is an ambitious experiment to say the least."
Heat: "The familiar caper plot may be distinctly rickety - Garden and a trio of former clients must raid a safety deposit box containing a security camera videotape that proves our hero's innocence and incriminates his corrupt cop nemesis (Stephen Dillane) - but it keeps moving along at an agreeable lick. The problem with Coogan's shtick is that it's a comedy of deflation: it's tricky to pull off sustained hilarity when you keep popping the balloon. That said, it's a tribute to Coogan's genius (particularly his flawless timing) that he manages to keep the comedy pumped up, even as he is simultaneously busy letting the air out."
The Times (Culture): "...The Coogan buzz isn't based on movie merit; it reflects a desperate British need to feel pride in the nation's comic prowess. The sad truth is that The Parole Officer is essentially a second-rate affair. ...[It] is not a bad film; it's an amiable, eager-to-please little British affair that I suspect many people will be entertained by. It echoes the warm-hearted Ealing comedies of old, evokes the ghost of The Italian Job and manages to sneak in a little modern gross-out humour of the Farrelly-brother kind as well. ...But this is a comic heist movie that ends up taking itself seriously and during the second half the humour plays a secondary role to the mechanics of the heist. The director, John Duigan (Sirens), wants to create nail-biting tension. But when you make a genre picture like this one, everyone knows how it will end. Even worse is the way the film indulges in parochial Little Ealingism, with its celebration of the values of the plucky English chap who takes on the powers that be, here a corrupt police force. Coogan and Normal seem to genuflect before old British movies like The Lavender Hill Mob (1951). Yet for all that, the film's title is The Parole Officer, not The Probation Officer, to keep the Americans happy. And that's hardly the defiant bulldog spirit it sets out to celebrate, is it?"
A TIME FOR DRUNKEN HORSES (PG)
This debut feature from director Bahman Ghobadi, who actually grew up in the village shown in the film, focuses on the terrible lives of the children in Iranian Kurdistan. The unexaggerated, yet absolute poverty in which the children live and the hard lives they lead is only relieved by the 'palpable love of family relationships.'
The Evening Standard: "This extraordinary film, affecting to the point of tears by its bravery and hopelessness, is a constant reminder to us in the West. How much we have, how little we care about it. .The explanation [of the title] encapsulates the tragedy. In order to buy medical aid for his ailing brother, a child of 15 about the size of a baby, Ayoub the teenage "father" of an orphaned family, joins some smugglers. Their cargo: huge lorry tyres, two to a mule. To fortify the beasts against cold and burden they're fed alcohol. Of course, when the inevitable ambush happens, the mules are too drunk to run off. The men scatter. The tyres cartwheel down the icy hill, taking all hope of profit with them. ...The landscape is an area of eroded despair - even the trees, their limbs amputated for firewood, look as if they're semaphoring for help with all they've got left. Yet, unbelievably, the spirit of family life is unquenchable. ...Throughout the film, photographed with startling clarity in harsh conditions by Saed Nikzat, the children talk feverishly among themselves of work, pay, illness, anxieties. They never talk of play, fun, happiness. You realise they're not living childhood as we know it. Yet the tenderness of their relationships, their loyalties to each other, put us to shame."
The Times (Part 2): "[This is] the latest Iranian film to approach its society through the way it treats its children. Set in a mountainous Kurdish area near the Iraqi border, it's also a heartbreaking, humbling story about the struggle for survival in a landscape made inhospitable by both nature and man. ...It's an almost unbearably harsh life; yet Ghobadi's film is never unremittingly bleak. The orphans are devoted to each other and especially to their severely handicapped brother Madi. Even when they face being separated to pay for an operation that might prolong his life, they never consider putting themselves first. One of the film's most heart-rending shots shows the tiny, helpless boy propped up in a saddle-bag while his future is decided around him; he's both the most innocent victim among many and a metaphor for his society. ...Ghobadi is an Iranian Kurd himself, and if his film is not overtly political, that's because there's little room for such luxuries in these lives lived on the margin. ...Like many recent Iranian films, A Time for Drunken Horses blurs the line between documentary and fiction: it's based on a true story and acted by non-professionals. Because Ghobadi's approach to an emotive subject is so unvarnished and unsentimental, it both rings movingly true and says something universal about the resilience of life and love."
PLANET OF THE APES (12)
A Tim Burton remake (he prefers to call it a 're-imagining') of the classic 1968 film with Mark Wahlberg playing the role of Leo Davidson, the astronaut who lands on a planet where the apes rule over their human slaves with a rod of iron.
Heat: "...The visuals, effects and make-up feats are about as good as you'd expect of a film with this kind of budget...[but the film suffers from a].lack of excitement, tension, imagination, plot intrigue and character development. Burton's Planet turns out to be a drab, dry, deeply unsexy place where nothing very interesting happens. For some mystifying reason, he and his scriptwriters have sapped all the spunk and verve out of the normally likeable Wahlberg and turned him into an empty shell of a man. The vague attempt to involve him in some king of romantic triangle is so flimsy they might as well not have bothered, and the would-be shock ending just doesn't make any sense. We've got used to disappointments so far in this summer of uninspiring blockbusters, but this is perhaps the biggest let-down of them all. It feels like Burton's creativity has been so constrained by trying to ensure a big box office success that he's turned in the most drably conventional and uninvolving film of his career. There is one summer popcorn flick convention he's broken with: it's not fun."
The Times (Part 2): "...this Planet seems to have been thrown together on the try-anything principle, with lingering memories of Gladiator somehow filtered into Flash Gordon in the Land of the Houyhnhnyms. An extraordinarily clunky "mystery" of how this planet came to be ruled by apes involves time travel, trained space monkeys, a simian creation myth and Mark Wahlberg being an idiot. ...A major problem is that Big Chuck is irreplaceable. Very few stars, then or now, could convincingly stand for the whole human race, and the former Marky Mark isn't one of them. .Though this whole mess turns out to be his fault, Davidson blithely unleashes a flaming terror weapon against ape hordes and never appreciates the irony of being enslaved, prodded and patronised by lab monkeys. Without heavy make-up, Wahlberg is still less expressive than Bonham Carter and Roth, whose excellent work is liable to go unnoticed and the film (not to mention the planet) would be better off without his character."
Film quiz
Just how much of a film fanatic are you? Answer these questions, add up your scores and find out!
Easy (one point for each correct answer):
- Which star of the original Planet of the Apes makes a cameo appearance in the current version, reprising his famous line "God damn them all to hell"?
- Which American comedy actor portrays the eponymous doctor in Dr Dolittle?
Less Easy (two points for each correct answer):
- Paul Hogan will soon return to UK cinema screens playing which hero from the Australian outback for the third time?
- Steve Coogan, currently starring in The Parole Officer, is best known for his creation and portrayal of which rather obnoxious television personality?
Difficult (three points for each correct answer):
- Which film in the UK Box Office Top 10 list features some slightly irreverent references to and reworkings of certain classic fairytales?
- Ewan McGregor is soon to be seen singing opposite Nicole Kidman in which film, set for release in September?
(Answers at bottom of page.)
Film chart
Obviously the audience figures only become available after the event so the film chart will always be a couple of weeks behind. Sorry!
UK BOX OFFICE (week ending 12 August 2001)
- Cats & Dogs
- Rush Hour 2
- Jurassic Park III
- Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
- The Parole Officer
- Shrek
- Swordfish
- Dr Dolittle 2
- Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
- Help! I'm a Fish
Quiz answers
- Charlton Heston
- Eddie Murphy
- Crocodile Dundee
- Alan Partridge
- Shrek
- Moulin Rouge
How did you do?
0-4 points: Who needs film when you can listen to the radio, eh?
5-8 points: You're a fan all right, but you're not a fanatic yet.
9-12 points: Move over Spielberg, there's a new man in town!
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