Brief crossing

Not so surprisingly, one of cinema's most successful directors of movies with bold sexual themes is a Frenchwoman, Catherine Breillat. Her 2001 movie, Brief Crossing, having been commissioned for French TV, is a short (80 mins) and bitter-sweet tale of inter-generational lust.

A 30-something French-speaking Englishwoman meets a virginal French youth half her age on an overnight ferry to Portsmouth. She has a cabin with twin beds, which she pushes together by the end of the trip. After having a cafeteria meal, cabaret-bar drinks, and exchange of views (hers, mostly) about males and female relationships, the older woman guides him to her cabin, and ends up smiling lovingly. The teenager thinks he's seduced her, loves her, and is loved.

In the early morning, during disembarkment, she slips away, revealing to the audience, and then the young tearful man, that she's a "happily" married woman with a child.

Such a simple plot requires a convincing pair of actors. Sarah Pratt, presumably of English origin, had appeared in some French TV productions. She's stereotypically aloof, with calculating eyes and cynical dialogue, while the youngster, Colombia-born Gilles Guillian (then 18), looks at her with smoldering shy stares and a growing awareness of her teasing interest. Neither of them needed to do much more than express longings and lusts through their eyes, strip for full-frontal moments, and engage in measured sexual simulations. Neither of them added extra depth, or obtained bigger or better roles in the next decade (though Pratt worked for Breillat again on Une Vieille Maitresse in 2007).

The development of their one-night affair during the sea crossing is written and directed well enough by Breillat but it's too clearly a televisual exercise, a dramatic device to present women's socio-political frustrations in a male-dominated world.

Howl

Movie-makers can adapt novels and biographies into their audio-visual medium; can they do similar reincarnations for poetry? Ron Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman tried in 2010, taking Allen Ginsberg's Howl, a seminal Beat Generation poetic outburst, as the heart and soul of an unusual biopic. It was a drop-out's streams of mildly manic consciousness, a Whitmanesque statement for a modern jazz age.

Ginsberg was a natural topic for the noted indie writer-directors. Epstein (born 1955) was one of the documentary team which collated the 1977 G&L study, Word is Out. He's shared Oscars for other gay documentary features: Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989), on which Friedman worked, and The Times of Harvey Milk (1984). In 2000, he and Friedman dug up gay historical threads in Nazi Germany, Paragraph 175, which won them a Teddy at Berlin, where they'd won the same award for their 1995 examination of hidden homosexuality in Hollywood, The Celluloid Closet.

It can be safely assumed that New Jersey-born Ginsberg, like Milk, was a subject who appealed to their personal sensibilities: he (1926-1997) was another politically committed Jewish homosexual. His generation included William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and two bi-sexual writers who infatuated Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. Radical in politics and a liberal drug-user, Ginsberg also dabbled in heterosexuality prior to meeting his life-long love, Peter Orlovsky, the New York-born child of non-Jewish Russian immigrants. Ginsberg's fame, and notoriety, sprang from Howl, his largely autobiographical free-form commentary on US youth. Its major affront to contemporary society lay in its usage of coarse words and acknowledgement of gay sex, prompting the 1957 prosecution of Ginsberg's publisher for obscenity.

The biopic film takes the trial as its focal point, employing animations (to illustrate extracts from the poem), archive footage and an exceptional cast to recreate scenes from the trial and the poet's life. James Franco, as Ginsberg, is the movie's linchpin, appearing clean-shaven in B&W for the initial reading of the poem at an adulatory writer's gathering in San Francisco in 1955, and in bearded colour to cite passages from a lengthy taped interview conducted at the time of the trial. Franco is surely more handsome and socially attractive than Ginsberg, who probably turned in glee in his grave.

The film project attracted other top talents. David Strathairn is the dutiful public prosecutor, Jon Hamm the straightforward defence attorney, Jeff Daniels a dismissive English professor, Bob Balaban the calm judge acquitting the publisher. Their statements are all taken verbatim from the official records, ensuring that the movie ends up looking and feeling like a documentary with recreations, as it is, rather than a less reliable docudrama.

Perhaps unfortunately, the directors' reputation for documentary integrity resulted in stilted courtroom scenes featuring a host of extras pretending to be rapt attendees, as artificially focused as the audience at the poem's reading. Similarly, the intellectual clarity and earnest tone employed for Franco's recreation of the interview are too good to be totally credible.

The prosecutor suggested that ordinary readers like him might think the poem was "sensitive bullshit". The documentary's audience might think the same. Howl was over-ambitious, a ponderous attempt by the pair of film-makers to do something more challenging and mainstream in their documentary work.

It had only a few festival nominations, and a couple of wins (one for Franco). Their next co-direction (2011) has a key change of emphasis: a biopic of porn star Linda (Deep Throat) Lovelace, who became a feminist anti-porn campaigner. They hoped to cast Franco as her exploitative photographer husband.

All about love

Any movie directed by Ann Hui is worth watching; those set in Hong Kong are cinematic albums of city memorabilia. In her latest (2010), All About Love, SoHo's restaurants and nearby Central-MidLevels escalator system and market lanes provide the richly colourful setting for an unusual mainstream movie experience: an examination of lesbian lives and loves.

Its blend of romantic comedy, socio-political commentary and pop psychology (written by Yee-shan Yang) only works some of the time while telling the tales of two schoolgirl friends who had an adult affair, split up, and meet again by chance when they've both become unintentionally pregnant.

Banking executive Anita (Vivian Chow) met young Mike (William Chan) through the Internet for a one-night fling, and the actress's dead-pan eyes help the audience to believe that her character hadn't realised he was a virginal quick-firing 19-year-old student who'd forgotten to put on his spare condom.

Her quick-tongued high-spirited ex-lover, Macy (Sandra Ng, of course), is a lawyer representing her office neighbour Robert (Eddie Cheung) in his divorce. After a few dinners and heart-to-hearts, she ends up teaching him how to give his wife orgasms, which leads to her accidental pregnancy. The two women attend a pre-natal clinic, and get re-acquainted in a cute up-and-down trip to their different flats beside the escalator on Hong Kong Island.

The "bi" women's characters, and nervousness about each other's commitments to each other and their pregnancies, are sketched charmingly, and the two men trapped in their predicament are well played and remarkably credible and likable comic fantasies. They're joined by a more intense married couple of lesbian friends who may adopt Macy's baby.

On the fringe of this sextet of very modern Hongkongers, a circle of dedicated feminist lesbian activists provide an occasional chorus of socio-political comments. Maybe they're intended to elaborate the women's difficulties, or add a wider perspective to the tale of middle-class angsts. But, when the political angle overwhelms the story, as with an emblematic street protest against her bank's harassment of Anita, the movie's credibility is diminished, and the ending is too pat to be true even for a rom-com fantasy.

Bruce Lee, my brother

One of modern Hong Kong's least forgivable failures is its lack of a museum, or a truly commemorative monument, to honour its most famous resident. The West Kowloon cultural complex probably won't have a museum or research centre to showcase any of the past glories of the Hong Kong film industry. Such bitter regrets were prompted by Bruce Lee, My Brother, the 2010 biopic co-produced by the kung fu star's younger brother, Robert Lee, and co-directed by Manfred Wong. Prolific actor-writer-producer Wong also wrote the screenplay, adapted (i.e. fictionalised) from the younger Lee's memoir. This was his fifth direction, the first since 1993's Da Lu (The Trail), and he shared the task with veteran Raymond Yip Wai-man.

For a little more than two hours, the film's finely photographed, costumed and decorated series of tableaux outline the early life in Hong Kong of Hollywood's first and foremost kung fu actor. It's a pretty movie that's rarely entrancing. At times too slow and reverential, the biopic feels akin to a historical slide show.

Much can be learnt about family members and traditions in the 30-strong household of Lee's hard-working father, a Cantonese opera star, from 1941 until Bruce was shipped off to the USA, his birthplace, to save him from Hong Kong police charges and gangster revenge. Key events and moments in Lee's childhood and teens are covered, in a valiant but stilted and far from revelatory effort to sketch the background of his personality and martial artistry. Bruce is presented rather than impersonated by a young actor with similar looks: singer-actor Aarif Lee (nee Rahman, his father having Malay-Arab-Chinese ancestry). After completing university in London in 2009, he returned to Hong Kong and co-starred in the award-winning Echoes of the Rainbow.

The end credits are worth watching for their juxta-positioning of historical family photos and the film's reconstructions. One far-fetched school story proves to be true: Bruce did win a cha-cha competition, choosing his young brother as his dance partner. In the movie, that's explained as the result of Bruce avoiding having to choose between a childhood tomboy who loved him and the girlfriend (Jennifer Tse, daughter of stars and sister of Nicholas) of his new best friend (well played by Zhang Yishan).

Both girls may be fictional characters, but brother Robert's voice-over notes that the male friend's drugs-related death in the 1960s affected Bruce deeply. In the movie, the friend's addiction is the result of his girlfriend's liking for Bruce, leading to an almost comic showdown with gangsters and the screenplay's recurrent evil limping character across four levels of multi-block scaffolding and boards.

Other homages to or quotations from classic kung fu movies include Western-style boxing and kung fu fighting matches with a Caucasian student (the supposed son of an English policeman has a North American accent). There are standard scenes of unpleasant Japanese and British administration of Hong Kong, conducted by the local villain (who ends up killed by the drug addict, as might be expected in such formulaic scenarios).

Many of the period details were interesting, particularly the captioned recreations of Hong Kong movies the young Bruce appeared in or might well have watched from the studios' rafters. However, too many artfully-lit close-ups of the Bruce-loving girls were tiring, while the banter of Bruce and his schoolfriends (one of whom was depicted as the stereotypically comic, fattish son of a household cook) and Bruce with his sisters also stretched credibility.

Tony Leung Ka-fai was effective as Lee Sr, and the first half-hour of the movie is his story. After that, he rarely appears (as in the reality of opera seasons, it can be assumed) and the film fails to illustrate Bruce's teenage relationship with him and his mother (whose family richness and English-speaking ability is not explained), played somewhat mysteriously by Christy Chung.

Born in San Francisco while his father was performing there, Bruce was sent back to the USA. His American wife and her family estate owns that part of his biography (until his death at 32), as an introductory statement indicates. The full Bruce Lee story waits to be told, and his family home and memorabilia still await long-deserved commemoration and display.

Serbian film, a

If a movie is totally banned in Australia, and needed 49 cuts and more than 4 minutes excised before it could even get an "18" certificate in the UK, one knows it's going to contain an above-average level of simulated sex and/or violence. Deliberately given a bland title by its makers, A Serbian Film is a deliberately black-souled challenge to its audiences, especially to former Yugoslavs.

"It's like a cartoon for grown-ups", the multi-lingual graduate wife of a semi-retired porn star explains to their cherubic four-year-old son when he accidentally watches one of his father's old movies. That one incident captures the mixed tone of the debut feature from director Srdjan Spasojevic: outrageousness with a sense of black humour.

None of the hard-to-pronounce/spell Serbian names of his excellent actors or talented technical crew (lighting, editing, soundtrack and cinematography) will be noted. However, they are part of the rationale the director employs for the making of a very controversial psycho-sexual horror film: his film would help foreign producers appreciate the potential value of working with the Serbian film industry. His main justification for his own exploitative film, expressed in the DVD extra of a post-screening Q&A in London, is that his study of porn film-making reflects the exploitation that the war-weary people of "Serbia and the region" endured for decades, and still experienced.

The story line is brutally realistic fantasy. The happily-married stud (a short flabby actor with presumably fake equine apparatus) is offered big money to star in "artistic pornography" for the export market; his wife agrees and a former female co-star is his trusted go-between. He will not be given a screenplay, being told to follow ear-phoned guidance from the megalomaniac director (a messianic psychologist, former orphanage operator and State Security officer rolled into one epitome of pseudo-benign evil).

The stud's elder brother, a corrupt cop, is jealous of his sibling's life and covets his sister-in-law, as the drugged and hallucinatory stud is forced to realise during the porn film's final day of shooting. By then, the stud has unwittingly buggered his own drugged wife and boy. He'd already seen that his co-star friend had all her teeth ripped out and got choked to death by a goon's cock. Revenge is delivered when the stud fucks the goon to death through an eye socket.

The stud slaughters the director and his goon cameramen, while his wife bludgeons his brother to death, after which he drives her and his child home, where he shoots the three of them, embraced in a bed, with one suicidal bullet. At which point, a new director and crew appear in the bedroom, a goon is instructed to be necrophiliac first with the child, thus leaving the audience with a final reminder of a previous incident in which a large goon had fucked (off-screen) a new-born baby moments after he helped to deliver it (on-screen).

Can a film that's technically superb and more than competently scripted and acted be acceptable if it's fundamentally amoral? Does exquisite use of available light and expressionist sets entitle a horror pseudo-snuff movie to serious consideration? It certainly has validity as a provocative devil's argument for the freedom of creative art, and warrants seeing once. Only once.

[The cuts ordered in the UK are described in detail on movie-censorship.com; they indicate that the British film censors were most concerned that audiences should not think child actors had actually watched simulated sex scenes. A few grisly moments were also trimmed, but the movie's plot developments were not emasculated.]

Never let me go

Kazuo Ishiguru, born in Nagasaki in 1954, arrived in England with his family when he was six. He became an Englishman with Japanese features, a British wife and a high reputation as an English-language novelist. His The Remains of the Day was brilliantly adapted by the Merchant-Ivory team: their quintessentially-British class-conscious pre-WWII costume drama notched up eight Oscar nominations in 1994 for best picture, director (Ivory), actor (Anthony Hopkins), actress (Emma Thompson), set and costume designs, musical score and screenplay (adaptation).

Apart from penning two TV movies in 1984, Ishiguru has written two original screenplays: The Saddest Music in the World (2003) for indie Canadian director Guy Maddin, and The White Countess (2005), for Ivory. Both were also period pieces. His novel Never Let Me Go appeared in 2005; a screenplay adaptation was soon crafted by his novelist friend Alex Garland (still best known for his debut novel, The Beach). He and Garland, two of the film's three executive producers, assembled a top-rate cast and crew, primed to create an award-winning romantic drama that's also a horror movie.

For the first half-hour, we observe three children (very well acted by youngsters) at a co-ed boarding school in the 1950s. They, and the audience, slowly realise all the school's children are clones, specially bred to be organ "donors" when they reach their mid-20s; the full, harsh truth is revealed to their class by a new teacher (Sally Hawkins) who is immediately sacked. The trio then re-appear, older and experiencing love, sex and jealousy.

Flashing forward, the scenario shows Kathy (Carey Mulligan) has matured into a self-deprecating 28-year-old, her organ transferals deferred as her gentle character makes her a natural "carer" helping donors, now including Ruth (Keira Knightley), cope with their death by four instalments. Ruth has found out the whereabouts of their schoolfriend Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and has a dying wish to atone for her theft of young Tommy's affections from Kathy.

They meet two donors, (Andrea Riseborough and Domhnall Gleeson), raised at another school, who pass on a rumour that donors can be granted deferrals if they prove true love. The trio conclude that the test of love lies in their childhood artwork, leading Kathy and Tommy to visit their retired schoolmistress (Charlotte Rampling) and art gallery curator (Nathalie Richard). No, they learn, the artwork only proved that the clones did have souls and were worthy donors.

Ruth's final donation made, her breathing tube switched off, her body is abandoned in an operating theatre. Now Kathy must watch Tommy's last, lethal donation, and tells the audience that she has been summoned for her first donation. Even those we help, she states unemotionally, may think they died too soon: that is the champion downer of a movie ending.

The movie is brilliantly depressing, filmed beautifully with a fine period feel, a slow-paced English rural air, by two Americans - director Mark Romanek (best known for the multi-award-winning One-Hour Photo in 2002) and cinematographer Adam (Capote) Kimmel. There is great work too from composer Rachel Portman (thrice an Oscar nominee, winning for Emma) and production designer Mark (Slumdog) Digby.

But, truly sadly, the unconvincing plot lacks depth and guts. It never explains why the donors quietly accept their role in society and premature death sentences. Without external conflict and real passion, the novel may have been a chastening read; as a movie, it became a beautifully arid exercise.

College boys live

College Boys Live, known as CBL to its voyeuristic members, was and probably still is a gay webcam site set up in Orlando, Florida by Zac Adams, a computer geek with an English-accented voice. In 2003, he either commissioned or approved the embedding of a film crew in his many-bedroomed suburban property with a pool and master computer ("CLAIR").

Six years later, a crew re-visited CBL in order to update its history, the previous material having been edited into a surprisingly engaging "reality" documentary-drama. As on real websites of that ilk, the nudity is minimal (with carefully framed non-genital exposure for the documentary's US movie audiences). The rare moments of sexual "action" are self-conscious pretence; the supposedly true shocks arise from the inhabitants' interactions and memoirs, as in mainstream reality TV shows.

Credit goes mainly to George O'Donnell, a documentary film editor since 1998: CBL was his debut as a producer and director. For the first half-hour, his movie lets the site's inhabitants speak for themselves: Adams and his live-in partner since 1901, Jonathan Greer, and the three young men (between 18 and 21) who have begun their six-month residence in the house as the new guests whom CBL members can watch, chat to and request specific actions from, 24-7.

There are 500 active viewers, affable Adams says, among the 2,000 members. They produce a monthly income for CBL of around US$20,000, enough to pay the mortgage and running expenses of the house and site. The resident "boys" don't get wages, just free bed and board in return for a few hours' chat-time a week and an almost constant lack of privacy from the house's 32 CCTV cameras. Adams also claims that he's enabling drop-out kids to find themselves, learning to live with their gayness while they establish regular lives as workers or students.

After six months, they're supposedly better equipped to fend for themselves in the real world, and the documentary notes in 2009 that 94 of them had stayed in the site since its launch. We are told, very briefly, what happened to the three residents filmed in 2003, but no attempt is made to research the post-CBL experiences of all the 94 young men. How many adjusted to reality? How many merely moved onto porn films or websites? How many found normal jobs or attended a "college"? (None of the showcased three did either while the documentary was being made, indicating why they were observed illicitly seeking funds from members and friends.)

Such idle curiosity is provoked by the movie's overview of what was/is apparently a "good" site in terms of exploitation of needy young gays. Judging by the three chosen in 2003, Adams and Greer (and their site's members) preferred feminine types. "JC" is a hyper, acned young man with mischievous and mean looks; "Chuck", large-toothed and camp; "Tim", possibly the best-looking and also the shyest. Their house-parents are gently avuncular (Adams) and handsomely fraternal (Greer).

Then drama starts, and never ends. The neighbours' owners association decides to force them out (using the nimby no-no of running a business in the residential area, and stirring the plot on local TV news). A new house is found and redecorated, and then proves not to belong to the cooperative woman who rents it to them. Meanwhile, Tim is short-changing a loving member emotionally, Chuck visits his loving sisters to reminisce about their drug-addicted dead mother, and JC reverts to lying, drinking and manic behaviour, visits his family vainly, and assaults his live-in lover (who accepts the site's offer to take JC's place and bedroom).

Inevitably, there are points when a viewer wonders how much is "real", re-enacted, scripted or fictional. The dramatic ironies and melodramatic moments pile up with increasing intensity, and the viewer can only accept the story as one that rings very true, and sad, providing unusual entertainment that's eye-openingly informative. Real or fake, the performers are fascinating.

Tangled

Walt Disney Pictures took a massive gamble with the company's 50th animated movie, Tangled, its version of the classic Grimm Brothers story of Rapunzel. With total costs reportedly reaching a $260 million, it was the second most expensive film ever made to date (exceeded only by Avatar). Within two months, its global box-office gross was nudging $400 million, and the gamble will pay off handsomely.

Kudos will go to John Lasseter, the Pixar chief executive and movie director who began his career as an animator at Disney and now also runs the corporation's animations division. His Pixar record as an unfailing creative and quality control genius surely persuaded Disney's board to risk a large chunk of the farm on an old-fashioned fairy story with no super-star voices.

Assuming that the quoted cost is not an accounting souffle, inflated wildly for taxation or other advantages, one has to wonder where the money went? Giving a film 3D effects accounts for a lot, and a lot of funds must have been spent paying for a small army of CGI animators to design, draw and light scenes that looked like hand-drawn paintings. The traditional show-off tricks of their trade are the usual delight to see: shadows, water, reflections, hair, movement, lighting, emotional eyes. When an audience just accepts them and concentrates on the story, Disney has achieved its traditional magic.

The scenario was written by Dan Fogelman, an award-winner for Cars who also wrote Bolt. He maintained the Grimm Brothers' outline, which Disney rightly assumed could be a winner. There were precedents galore: Rapunzel, a naive princess (Princess and the Frog, etc) kept away from the outside world (ala Little Mermaid, etc) by an evil witch (Cinderella, etc) is introduced to reality by a cheeky intruder (a sexily goateed Aladdin with Errol Flynn cockiness). She will have a cute animal friend (animators' dream creature, a chameleon) and there'll be a mock-villainous animal thwarting the hero (this time, pompous guardhorse Maximus).

The horse is delightful; a little disappointingly (but wisely for the story) the chameleon isn't allowed to play a distracting role. The key animation challenge, and success, is Rapunzel's multi-metred head of magic hair. It can cure lethal ailments, and be used as a rope, elevator and whip. It never looks lanky or bulky and is rightly featured like a co-star in some advertising. Equally masterful are the hundreds of floating lanterns launched to mark the lost princess's birthday.

The voices of the teenage princess (singer-actress Mandy Moore) and her young saviour (Zachary Levi, Broadway musical and TV series star) could have been heard in any other Disney modern classic: clear, sassy and very American. Ditto for the music and songs from Disney stalwarts Alan Menken, the leading living Oscar-winner (eight by 2010) in his specialised category, and lyricist Glenn Slater.

Donna Murphy (Tony-winning Broadway actress and Sondheim singer) is the voice for an under-stated evil character (Mother Rothel), whose dependence on Rapunzel's magic isn't scorned, and she merrily sings my favourite song in the movie, Mother Knows Best. There seemed to have been a conscious decision to downplay her character and not exaggerate it in the style of Little Mermaid or 101 Dalmatians. The usual Disney musical extravaganza, in the exuberant OTT style of a Busby Berkeley choreography, is a happily fast-paced scene in a thugs' character-full forest bar, the Snuggly Duckling.

A Christmas release and 3D-premium seat prices helped Tangled do well with its customary family market. After six years in expensive pre-production, it needs to gross close to a billion dollars to convince Disney that a 51st old-style animation should be greenlit. One hopes so because such movies are pure entertainment.

Company men

Everyone in Hollywood wants to be a director, especially big shots like John Wells. He had an excellent track record as a TV series creator, writer and producer (China Beach, Third Watch, West Wing, Smith, ER, Southland, Shameless). He'd directed nine episodes of ER, and had ample co-production funds to let himself write and direct a debut feature movie.

The Company Men, made in 2009, focuses on three senior- executive victims of US corporate down-sizing, played by Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper. For supporting roles, Wells snapped up Kevin Costner, Rosemarie DeWitt, Craig Wilson and Maria Bello. The movie premiered at Sundance in January 2010 and was bought by The Weinstein Company, which released it in January 2011 during the run-up to the Oscars. All concerned had dreamt of Oscar nominations.

The lethal problem with the movie as a cinema production is its formulaic blandness. The top-grade cast appear to be going through their standard emotions, in a plot-by-numbers scenario that may have originally been designed as a TV series pilot. Wells's direction makes the episodic flow of incidents look like a teleplay too, with lushly-furnished high-end Boston real estate, a trio of corporate execs whose friendly associations feel like dramatic contrivances, and cliched spouses (supportive working wife, spoilt rich matron, warmly sexual workmate).

Any regular consumer of above-average TV soap-operatics will guess the plot developments, and fans of Wells' productions will anticipate hearing several anti-capitalism barbs from the very non-Republican two-time president of Hollywood's Writers Guild. Collectors of TV cliches will also know the dismissed executives will form their own company, whose battles with their arch-capitalist former boss might have provided the framework for an aborted TV drama series.

Jack goes boating

It's heartwarming when actors who don't have classical good looks get top billing in movies. To get it, they need above-average talent, indie productions and modest wage demands. Handsome actors usually don't take roles that make them look far from handsome (exceptions include, very notably, Christian Bale). What's the ratio of handsome to non-handsome Best Actor Oscar winners, I wondered, and found out (later). The next wonderment was obvious: How many handsome actors ever won Best Supporting Actor? (later too)

One star actor in the non-handsome category is fairly obese and facially fattish Philip Seymour Hoffman, the length of whose name is not appealing either for cinema owners. He won the 2005 Best Actor Oscar for Capote (his first nomination); his latest indie is Jack Goes Boating, which he also directed (the best way any actor gets top billing).

Hoffman also co-produced the movie, adapted from a stage play he'd performed in for a six-week season off-Broadway in 2007. Its "opened-out" screenplay was also written by its playwright, ex-actor Bob Glaudini. His chamber drama counterpointed the relationship of a Latino limo driver (ethnic Puerto Rican John Ortiz) with his unfaithful wife (Panama-born Daphne Rubin-Vega) with that of his single white colleague (Hoffman) and the Latina's single white female colleague (they work for an oddball funeral director).

The two Latinos had been in the stage production; Amy Ryan joined Hoffman's movie cast as the fourth lead character. She'd acted alongside him in 2007's blackly comic Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, and was a multi-award-winner and Oscar nominee for supporting actress the same year for Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone. A typical indie actress, angular and even more worried looking than Catherine Keener and her ilk, Ryan is far from beautiful, yet she and Hoffman play off their characters' frailties enchantingly.

They are reserved, complexly simple, gauche and a credible middle-ageing working-class pair of misfits. She must learn to trust someone; he must learn how to be the first man to cook her a meal while his Latino friend teaches him how to swim, so that he can take her for a summertime row in Central Park. Their first sexual experience is portrayed with very moving tenderness.

Hoffman indulges in no directorial exhibitionism, letting his fellow actors' body languages enrich the parallel depictions of love and relationships. Fine camera work presents snowy New York as a suitably thrilling and chilling backdrop, embellished by the sensitively-slow-paced editing (Mott Hupfel and Brian Kates respectively, who'd both worked with Hoffman on The Savages in 2007). The only aspect of the film that felt slightly over-blown was the choice of background songs, possibly arising from the Hoffman character's passion for reggae; obtrusive lyrics muddied the characters' dialogue.

The quartet of actors had an ideal showcase, their talents investing the adapted play's theatricality with credibility. Wisely, Hoffman chose a small pond for his first directing effort, and swam well.

*****

Best Actor Oscars:

Cheeringly, since the 1960s, "handsome" actors have won fewer times than might be expected: Denzel Washington, Tom Hanks (twice, but playing an emaciated AIDS victim and a simpleton), Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, Daniel Day-Lewis (twice, playing a handicapped man and a madman), Jeremy Irons, Jon Voight.

Best Supporting Actor Oscars:

More "handsome" winners than expected: George Clooney, Cuba Gooding Jr, Spacey and Washington again, Kevin Kline, Sean Connery, Jason Robards (twice), Gig Young, Robert De Niro.

Handsomeness lies in a beholder's eye, of course: some people love Jack Nicholson's looks.

Dinner for schmucks

Every tribe has distinctive comic traditions, and the French have some of the cleverest. By comparison, Brits provide crude wit (pantomime, Carry On, Little Britain), Hollywood lowest-common-denominators (Apple Pie, Adam Sandler, Laurel and Hardy, TV sitcoms). Few had hopes when the piercing French satire, Le Diner de Cons (The Dinner Game), was remade. Its title was a warning: Dinner for Schmucks.

The Yiddish word upset some New Yorkers, some of whom preferred "schlemiels", while some saw racist usage and folks in the finance industry were upset personally. Others preferred the true translation of the original French, Dinner for Idiots (which is wording used in the Hollywood screenplay). Of such banality are movie PR campaigns made. Whatever, film buffs sneer, Hollywood simply distorted and trashed a truly comic concept.

That had been effectively simple: a group of snobs hold a monthly competitive dinner party to which each invites an idiot, a comically obsessive character. In the French story, a supposed simpleton surprises his host in deservedly unpleasant ways. In Hollywood, a total rewrite by David Guion and Michael Handelman kept the basic premise, adding situations and jokes they thought would lap up laughter in US cineplexes. The pair's only previous work was The Ex, a rom-com bomb in 2006 that also found feeble comedy in objectionable characters.

The producers (who included Sacha Baron Cohen) chose a suitably experienced director, Jay Roach, who'd co-created and -produced the Austin Powers farces and the Fockers franchise (directing its first). He was also a producer for a mixed bag of Hollywood comedies, including Cohen's Borat and Bruno, the Sandler/Barrymore 50 First Dates, the failed adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Diane Keaton's disastrous Smother. Running against form, he'd won Emmys, Globes and other awards for his direction of HBO's Recount (a well-acted docudrama on the 2000 US presidential election farrago in Florida).

In view of most of the preceding paragraph, it's remarkable that the French film's veteran director, Francis Veber, signed up as an executive producer for the remake. He'd co-written the screenplay adaptation of La Cage aux Folles (1978), wrote and directed Les Fugitifs (1986), adapted My Father the Hero (1994), wrote Le Placard (the 2001 gay rights satire starring Depardieu, also directed by Veber), and another three dozen features. Veber specialises in slapstick with wit, which the Schmucks' script didn't have.

The film relied instead on Paul (Sisters, Friends) Rudd and Steve (SNL) Carrell as its comic leads, playing the hot-shot company executive whose winning guest is an obsessive creator of dioramas showcasing suitably dressed dead mice. The two so-so comic talents had worked together previously on Anchorman and The Thirty-Year-Old Virgin.

The project's $69 million budget squeezed in a handful of other comic faces to be supposedly supportive actors, all of whom read out their cliched cringe-worthy dialogue with forgiveably blank expressions: Zach Galifianakis (beard, currently Hollywood's least funny comic star), the UK's David Walliams (Little Britain, strutting Germanically) and Lucy Punch (as a long-legged vamp again, much better when directed by Woody Allen). Kiwi Jemaine (Flight of the Conchords co-creator/star) Clement, playing an eccentric commercial artist, to counterpoint Carrell's character. Many other known faces appear, for a total terrible waste of small talents.

This is one of the least enjoyable, least funny products to creak off Hollywood's assembly belts in 2010. The lumbering movie is surely a certified loss-maker for Dreamworks and its other producers, meaning, all gods willing, that it will not spawn a sequel. One factor keeping it off the worst rating level were the artists who crafted the mice tableaux: they are cute, with some wit.

Black swan

One plus factor for the Golden Globes charade is its distinction between "drama" and "comedy/musical" categories. To the delight of directors, producers and lead actors, the distinction means that two sets of talents earn "best" recognitions. A Golden Globe isn't an Oscar but it's certainly the next best thing for actresses such as Annette Bening and Natalie Portman. They both can't win the 2011 female acting Oscar, but they did win the year's two Globes, Portman for psychosexual thriller Black Swan. She should win the year's Best Actress Oscar too.

Director Darren Aronofsky developed the idea of dramatising the Black Swan/White Swan conflict immortalised in Tchaikovsky's ballet music, adapting an original story (The Understudy) by film-maker Andres Heinz, who re-worked his own screenplay for Aronofsky. He'd discussed the project with Natalie Portman for a decade. She clearly sensed that this could be the role of a lifetime, as a psychologically disturbed dancer who was a natural White Swan but lacked the passion to convince her ballet company director that she could also perform the twin role of the Black Swan.

In the ballet, the black swan seduces the lover of the white swan, who commits suicide. It's a romantic melodrama, with appropriately sensuous music and traditional choreography. By the time Aronofsky got the relatively low-budget (US$13 million) movie funded in 2009, by Fox Searchlight, Portman was barely young enough (28) to undergo months of arduous ballet training. She did, and she's convincing to a non-balletomane.

She also had to be convincing as an overly-mothered self-wounding sexually-repressed obsessive dancer for whom professional and personal strains lead to evil hallucinations. In this movie version, the white swan learns to hate her mother, imagine a passionate lesbian adventure with her dancing rival, take drugs, commit murder, grow webbed feet and stab herself in the stomach with a shard of glass. Although lethally wounded, she triumphs at the end of the ballet's first night, dying happily, having achieved "perfection". One minute after the film's end, an audience knows that most of the action never really happened, but Portman makes it all feel credible enough at the time.

Aronofsky makes it look believable too, even when the moments of blood-tainted horror are far-fetched. Naturally, the cinematography (Filipino-American Matthew Libatique working with his favourite director for the fourth time) focuses sharply on shades of black and white, offset by touches of pink. Aptly, too, the excellent musical soundtrack contains variations on Tchaikovsky themes when it isn't playing the real thing in rehearsal and performance scenes from the ballet.

It is an under-stated grand guignol movie which totally depends on Portman for validity. She's on-screen almost all the time, and a small supporting cast really support her, avoiding scenery-chewing exaggerations of their cliched characters: Vincent Cassel (manipulative ballet director), Barbara Hershey (smothering ex-dancer mother), Mila Kunis (rival and ideal black swan) and Winona Ryder (forced-out ballerina and suicide).

Portman, born in Jerusalem, is an Israeli-American. Cassel (the son and husband of other famous actors) is French, Kunis was born in the Ukraine, Hershey and Ryder are American. The three women are Jewish, as is Aronofsky. Raised in a Conservative Jewish home, he may need a supportive ethnic blanket. His award-winning debut feature. Pi, was a Jewish-centric mathematical thriller. The Goldfarbs, mother and son, were central characters in his second movie, Requiem for a Dream, co-starring half-Jewish Jennifer Connelly. Rachel Weisz married him in 2001 (separating in 2010) and she co-starred in his 2005 resurrected third feature, The Fountain, a three-part essay on love and death that bombed badly.

He bounced back in 2008 with The Wrestler, a good grosser (US$45 million) starring Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei, with no visible Jewish angles. Aronofsky has now delivered an even bigger earner, and may no longer need his blanket: his next projects are the Wolverine sequel (working again with Hugh Jackman, his Fountain co-star) and another comic-book action-adventure, Machine Man.

127 hours

2010 was the year in which James Franco started getting taken even more seriously by Hollywood. So much so that he was picked to co-host the 2011 Oscar presentations.

In indies, he'd turned in a fine supporting performance as the gay lover of Harvey Milk (2008), then gaining more notice in 2010 in the lead role (and another gay character) for Howl, the docudrama focused on Allen Ginsberg's poetry. His blockbuster experience has been above-average, in a supporting role for the Spider-Man franchise, and below-par (co-star of Tristan + Isolde). He's not been averse recently to appearing in commercial comedy (starring in Pineapple Express, bit-parting in Date Night) and drama (In the Valley of Elah, Eat Pray Love), and being a member of a TV ensemble (General Hospital 2009-10).

As he's also continued to create a big handful of short films with friends (including a Teddy award-winner at Berlin), as well as direct, star in and co-write five features (Fool's Gold, The Ape, Good Time Max, the 2010 SNL documentary Saturday Night, and the 2011 Bret Harte biodrama The Broken Tower), it can safely be assumed that multi-talented Franco is a workaholic. A fan might worry that he over-works, over-exposes himself.

In Danny Boyle's 127 Hours, Franco is carrying a whole movie, using his personality and talent to represent Aron Ralston, an over-confident mountaineer who wrote a book about his true-life dramatic dilemma. Trapped beneath a canyon boulder for five days in April 2003, his only hope of survival lay in cutting off his own right arm below the elbow.

His spellbinding performance earned Franco a slew of award nominations; it will be interesting to see how many he can win in a year when major competition includes Colin Firth (The King's Speech) and Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network).

His winning chances would be nil without the remarkable framework created by co-writer and director Danny Boyle. He and Simon Beaufoy (his Slumdog Millionaire co-writer) opened out the scenario brilliantly, soaring above the confines of a fixed setting in which one man is trapped deep in a narrow ravine. Inevitable flurries of cuts show the man's physical and mental agony, his many practical ploys to ease and resolve his situation, and the raw beauty of the stark canyon landscapes. Cuts and fades also lead to scenes from the man's past family life, friendships and hopes, adapted from Ralston's own memories of the thoughts that swirled through his mind during five days trapped in Death's door.

There are moments, however, when an audience may feel that Boyle has collated every trick of his trade, almost exhausting its repertoire of camera angles, screen effects and contrasts. The musical soundtrack is similarly diverse, a bundle of classic sounds (such as a jazz version of a Piaf song) and original works from A.R.Rahman, the Oscar-winning composer on Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire.

It's a good film, though not as gripping and heart-wrenching as another mountaineering docudrama, Touching the Void. It's likely to be more memorable as a worthy vehicle for James Franco.

Down Terrace

From 2006 on, Ben Wheatley co-wrote and directed British TV series each year with Robin Hill, who also acted in them. In 2009, the pair completed their first feature, Down Terrace. Inevitably, it was a crime caper; no other genre seems to get green-lighted for low-budget British film projects.

The long struggling life of a wannabee movie-maker can be guessed from Hill's listed credits. Together with the young Hurst brothers, he'd co-written/produced and acted in a very low-budget (£4,000) Betacam thriller in 1996 about a bunch of druggie squatters in Brighton, Project Assassin. His father, Robert Hill, helped out by playing a menacing government mind controller. Their effort never saw the light of a UK projector, but it was bought, transferred to film and distributed by a German producer in the European market.

With Down Terrace, one senses that Hill and Wheatley initially conceived a new TV six-parter, a noir sitcom about a crime family coping with treachery in a nondescript suburb of Brighton. Clearly inspired by the idea of a working-class British gang a la Sopranos, they created a group of mentally-disturbed criminals with generation gaps and bizarre spouses. It was filmed in the Hill family's own house in Brighton; Mr Hill Sr took the role of the gang's unctuous ex-hippie folk-singing father figure. Mr Hill Jr played his neurotic son, and his team probably realised they had the makings of an above-average crime movie/sitcom/family drama. In any case, the volume of "fucking" in the dialogue and the brutally comic murders in the plot would have confined the series to a late-night slot on a minor British TV channel.

The movie version, if that's what it is, has an episodic style suited to TV, with quick cuts to black between scenes. Each day is announced with captions, and the movie employs hand-held cameras and close-ups to catch the bitter family banter and characters' repressed hatreds and fears. As in Mike Leigh films, the claustrophobic atmosphere of a real, scruffy tenement house's rooms focuses attention dramatically on the actors, whose performances are as convincingly "natural" as those in a Leigh ensemble (and that of the recent Australian crime family saga, Animal Kingdom).

The family house is an integral part of the story, which stays in the living room and front door corridor while it establishes the individual characters: harassed mother, pregnant girlfriend and middle-aged gang mates greeting the father (late 50s) and his son on their return home after a courtroom acquittal. Someone shopped them, they believe, and their London boss is concerned. Half-way through, the film ventures outside the house, into the surrounding Downs countryside, then back in the house to the upstairs toilet and out to the small back garden.

Good editing and camera-work heighten the tension, twisting it with laugh-out-loud murders, providing frequent musical relief through folk songs' fake poignancy. They echo the storyline that this family depends on dreams and lies, and will destroy itself with sadness. That's good material for a finely-designed debut feature that deserves a lot of recognition and awards.

[The historic southern English seaside resort city gained fresh notoriety for its status as a haven for London's criminals (especially Cockneys) in the mid 1940s from the success of Brighton Rock, a novel by Graham Greene, who re-wrote it for the stage and cinema, with young Richard Attenborough in the lead role. (Rowan Jaffe's 2010 remake, starring Sam Riley, was to be released in February 2011.)]

Red

Gathering a big handful of ageing stars has become a Hollywood fad. When the ensembles seem to be having fun working together, they are fun to watch, as in The Expendables and Red, an action-adventure dramatising a 3-volume DC Comics series.

Plumping for comedy rather than the original comic-books' gory violence, the screenplay-wrights (Erich and Jon Hoeber) had learned from experience. Their adaptation of comic-book Whiteout, starring Kate Beckinsale in Antarctica, bombed spectacularly. Working for Wes Craven on a dramatisation of Alice, a successful computer game, the Hoeber brothers saw the project flip-flop between studios and end up on a shelf. Their first and only other feature, Montana, had been a comedy-thriller starring Kyra Sedgwick and Stanley Tucci back in 1998. Red has saved their joint career, its global box-office gross almost tripling its US$58 million budget and prompting Hollywood buzz for a sequel.

The comic-book author's concept had supposed that a Retired, Extremely Dangerous (RED) CIA officer had needed to gather old comrades together to solve murders and save his own life. Bruce Willis was available and willing, and the project also appealed to Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich (paranoid operative, of course), Helen Mirren (MI6), Brian Cox (KGB) and Ernest Borgnine (CIA archivist). Richard Dreyfuss signed on too (arms dealer) and Willis's love interest (his pensions office contact) and amateur sleuthing buddy was an ideal comic role for bubbly Mary-Louise Parker. One youngster (not yet 40) got a chance to prove his worth: Kiwi Karl Urban (Lord of the Rings, Star Trek remake, Bourne Supremacy) brought depth to the formulaic role of the CIA hot shot gunning for Willis.

They all clearly had great fun making the enjoyably silly caper, which was well paced by German director Robert (Tattoo, Flightplan) Schwentke, whose previous Hollywood effort, The Time Traveler's Wife, had been a chick-flicky box-office success booed by most critics. I expected little and was pleasantly surprised; that's good enough for a Hollywood product.

Unstoppable

Producer-director Tony Scott (brother of Ridley) had a successful track record in the action-adventure genre until he unnecessarily and inadequately remade The Taking of Pelham 123 in 2009. It co-starred Denzel Washington, who'd previously worked with Scott on Deja Vu (2006), Man on Fire (2004) and Crimson Tide (1995). They got together again in 2010 to make Unstoppable, an action-adventure set on a runaway train.

Although Scott has often worked with other lead black actors, he and Washington clearly like each other's style. Washington's asking price is reportedly US$20 million, Scott's US$9 million, which means they have to guarantee an exceptional box-office gross to justify themselves. The Fox studio bosses balked at the Unstoppable project costings, setting a budget ceiling of less than US$90 million. Scott gave up a third and Washington shaved an unknown amount, trade gossip said. It can be guessed that both hoped to make up the differences through their production company percentages.

Their movie grossed US$146 million globally at box offices in 2010, with DVD rentals and sales set to boost the total handsomely. The arithmetic was better than for the pair's critically-panned Pelham 123 remake for Columbia.

Unstoppable is a variation on the theme of a race against time by ordinary folks obliged to act as heroes, as in the Die Hard franchise, the two Speed romps, etc ever since the Perils of Pauline included the frantic silent movie maiden being tied to the railroad tracks. Movies in the genre can usually only be judged by commercial standards: does the movie thrill, does it create belief in inevitable and impossible plot developments, does it have its audience sat on the edge of their mental seats?

Mark Bomback was the major writer of the latest (2007) Die Hard action-adventure, and his screenplay does an effective job of transforming the bare bones of a real news story into a Hollywood product. A half-mile-long goods train is accidentally set lose, without its driver and a working brake system. Its cargo includes toxic chemicals whose explosion would destroy a small city. The obstinate railway company's operations director (white male) orders a helicopter drop and a derailing; both fail, and a single engine on the same line is the only hope for salvation.

Its engineer is a black veteran (Washington) with two sassy teenage daughters. Its conductor is a white rookie with a baby and a marital problem; Chris Pine (fresh from his breakthrough in Star Trek) gives the role a grizzly charm, even though the scenario sets up buddy bonds whose triteness, and dependence on wry grins, is a challenge for both actors. To vary the pace and on-screen face, there's a female lead: Rosario Sin City Dawson is the rail operations local manager (black female). Many of the genre's usual suspects also appear in the cast list: nerdy safety inspector, neurotic welder, klutzes, trainload of schoolchildren, horse van, carriage roof jumps and sticky couplings.

The family problems of the two men in the engine, conducted via cellphones, serve to fill out what could be a 20-minute docudrama. Similarly, repetitive shots of rail company machinations and TV newscasts elongate a thin plot (and enable Fox to plug its own news network relentlessly). Naturally, this being a typical American movie, the screenplay is packed with oodles of cringe-making declarations of family love, collegiate joy and personal heroism.

Fortunately, Tony Scott was on good form for this formulaic movie, blending a great range of aerial shots and close-ups to produce the essential edge-of-the-seat tension. Film editing, background music and special effects boost the mood and acceptability of a run-of-the-mill movie that runs faster and better than might be expected.

Somewhere

For the first three minutes a Ferrari revs past the static camera, going round a small dirt track five times, its revs fading and reappearing. The sports car stops, a man gets out and stands still. Then we see title credits for Somewhere, for a minute. The first scene shows a drunk man falling down a staircase during a party at Hollywood's showbizzy Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Blvd. Cut to his bedroom where a pair of long-legged long-haired blonde twins in red high heels, red g-strings and tiny nursing jackets are pole-dancing to heavy pop music while the man falls asleep. Seven minutes has past, and an audience knows that this is a film about an aimless, rich man needing relief from ennui. Yawn? Switch-off time?

It would have been, but a film written and directed by Sofia Coppola deserves more time to grow on its audience, just as her Oscar-winning Lost in Translation did and her Marie Antoinette demanded. She won the National Board of Review's 2010 Special Achievement Award for writing, producing and directing Somewhere, and it also won her the Golden Lion at the same year's Venice Film Festival - beating off Black Swan, among various other better-rated entries, for the unanimous decision from the jury chaired by Quentin Tarantino (time for upraised eyebrows). Even more commanding was the Rotten Tomatoes scoreboard: 143 favourable reviews at the latest count, giving it a high 76% rating.

Back to the movie, at the seven-minute mark. What happens to the man? We learn he's Johnny Marco, a depressed movie star (played as a reticent Depp type, poorly, by B-lister Stephen World Trade Center Dorff) who leads an off-screen life of pill-popping, booze and casual sex. His 11-year-old daughter is dropped off at the hotel by his ex-spouse, and the movie brightens up because pre-teen Elle Phoebe in Wonderland Fanning (sister of Dakota) has eyes that can invest value if not meaning into a nothing like Coppola's scenario. Father and daughter bond, and travel to Italy for a mildly comic movie promotion (cue deluxe Milan hotel) before returning for a few jaunts in a helicopter and casino.

The girl goes somewhere, and Coppola ran out of ideas. The actor is left to his own despairing devices. He leaves us too, after stopping the Ferrari beside a desert and starting to walk down the road (to somewhere?), toward the camera, with a momentary smile. This is what connoisseurs call bookending, I'm told: starting and ending a movie with a motif. Usually, I'd guess there will be a book between bookends, even Ferraris.

Luckily, Coppola only spun out her flimsy semi-autobiographical thoughts about ennui and celebrity for 90 minutes. If anyone other than a child of a Hollywood icon made this self-indulgent boring home-style movie, full of silences and self-pity, signifying nothing to real film-goers, they'd be scorned. But surely 142 critics, the NBR and Tarantino can't all be wrong ...

Freakonomics

University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt reportedly "accepts the standard neoclassical micro-economic model of rational utility-maximization". He should: his collection of sociologically interesting chapters on pop economics, Freakonomics, was a best-seller in 2005 (shifting over 4 million sales units). Co-written by New York Times journalist Stephen Dubner, and developed from articles they'd published in the newspaper, the book considered economics to be a study of incentives. Aptly, it spawned its own money-earning mini-industry of business consultancy.

In 2010, a movie version appeared, collating the efforts of six indie documentary-makers to dramatise and visualise some of the book's contents. My copy of the book had sat unread on the shelf for years, and the film has given me a strong incentive to read it and see if it's useful. The movie isn't.

The fact of it being co-produced by the two authors, who appear as a scripted pair of layman-friendly experts introducing and linking the segments, suggests they had their own incentive for making it. It's surely designed to be a sales tool for their consultancy business.

"If you have a good idea what a person's incentives are, you have a good idea how they're going to behave", one of them says. They say that economics (i.e. human life) is all a matter of "causality", "correlation" and challenging convention. Prior to their book's publication, such an attitude used to be called "thinking outside the box", so they haven't invented a wheel.

Only one of the segments was worth seeing on the two levels that matter for a documentary: content and style. Veteran documentary-maker Alex Gibney delivered a handsomely-filmed and glossily-edited review of cheating, corruption and crime in Japan's supposedly sacrosanct sumo wrestling set-up. The American authors didn't seem to have done any research themselves; they'd collected harsh facts revealed by whistle-blowers and journalists in Japan.

Elsewhere, there were few of the Eureka! moments that publishers' PR for the Freakonomics volume had led me to expect, and some of the authors' conclusions have been challenged. One of them is so simplistically wonderful that one wants it to be true: legalised abortion in the USA drastically reduced crime rates a generation later, just as enforced pregnancy in Romania led to a future crime wave and revolution (both government moves confirming that wanted children get better care). Although "cause and effect" is an ancient correlation, it's cheering to be shown such modern "proofs" that do-gooders may well do bad.

"Incentives", as illustrated in the movie, is an academic word for bribery. The documentary's segment reporting a project (at the University of Chicago of course) to improve high school students' grades by means of monthly incentive payments only proves another ancient adage: a horse can be taken to water, but it can't be forced to drink it. The two male students chosen as Grade C and E models were clear examples of documentary-makers' incentivisation too: they'd chosen to track a pair of theatrical personalities (one black, one white) with equally talkative single moms in order to make their segment audience-pleasing.

"Causality" etc is common sense dressed up in pop economic verbiage. As Dubner jokes in an aside to his co-writer at the end, after a bit of hyperbole, "That was total bullshit, wasn't it?!" Much of their movie really was.

Raging sun, raging sky

A-

The B&W photography is outstanding, the aspirations of the writer-director have to be admired, but the length he went to express them is unjustified.

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If it won the Teddy Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, a movie includes an LGBT issue and will probably be worth watching. The inaugural winner, in 1987, was Almodovar for Law of Desire, and the list of annual awardees (a page in Wikipedia) for Best feature, Jury and Special films includes many good movies (the 2010 winner was The Kids Are All Right). LGBT Awards are also presented annually for Best Documentary and Best Short Film.

Raging Sun, Raging Sky won the feature award in 2009 and is an ambitious work of classy soft gay porn from Mexico's Julian Hernandez. The writer-director was already a multi-award-winner for A Thousand Clouds of Peace (his debut feature, which also won him the feature film Teddy in 2003 ) and Broken Sky (2006), and has been making gay shorts and documentary films since 1992.

"Sky", "clouds", "sky" : his fans could guess Hernandez would look to the heavens for more inspiration. In his third feature, its two lead roles are passionate lovers, portrayed handsomely by young actors each working only for the third credited time in a movie, (and for the first time as leads in a feature). When Ryo (Guillermo Villegas) is kidnapped by a jealous boxer (also a first feature role, for Javier Olivan), Kieri (Jorge Becerra) can only save him with the guidance of a divine female spirit (Giovanna Zacarias).

Simple storyline, extraordinary rendition.

When it was shown in Berlin, the movie ran for an awesome 191 minutes. Back home in Mexico, its screened version had lost 50 minutes. The DVD issued by TLA is the uncut epic version, and has to be seen for it to be believed that anyone would dare, or be able to, create an experimental gay epic in which lots of handsome non-camp young Mexican males are beautifully filmed while constantly cruising and connecting, mostly in the toilet of a rundown urban cinema specialising in screening hard gay porn.

Lustrous black-and-white cinematography uses lavishly teased available light to weave silky shadows and sensuous close-ups of skin spots, dead-pan expressions and frantic fornication. When two men reach a bedroom, they silently strip to their briefs to pace slowly, gaze outwards and skywards, and then grasp each other with full frontal embraces, wet kisses galore and full dorsal pseudo-action.

The film's first focal point is Ryo, who has the elfin charm of a Mexican-Indian Sabu. Before that the film tracks a woman wandering city streets for 15 minutes, seeking her desired human contact: Ryo's sparkling boyish smile enchants her and leads them to dance in the rain and eventually copulate tenderly. You will meet the strong man you need, the voluptuous woman intones to the back of the apparently heterosexual youth when they part silently in the morning.

No one in the screenplay ever communicates directly in words. Touch, strokes, glances, stares and sex are all that the characters need, and the only conversations belong to the world of make-believe heard off-camera in TV soaps. Such symbolism feels apt until the scenario takes its lead characters into a world of ancient ruins, sandy caverns with burning torches, genitalia and nude clambering.

Much was unclear amid the faded green weeds of the wasteland; I think a couple or more of the dreamy chapters repeated themselves. I was surprised to see the boxer again, in a snappy toga, because I thought he had already been slain during or after anal sex by an aggrieved sex partner who he'd previously beaten up after giving him a blow job. What else would a sudden splurge of red on the screen mean?

But the boxer (a psychotic swarthy Zorro type with a slimline beard) reappeared like a demon angel to steal sweet sleeping Ryo, who had found true love with his fated lover, Kieri (a Latino Keanu Reeves, with eyes that can act). The boxer laid the lad's supposedly dead (but visibly breathing) naked body down inside a cave, after flying them both into it down an invisible cable. Meanwhile, the desperate lover emerges from sleep, and being buried in sand, to slay the boxer, as his female guardian angel told him to, after which he resurrects Ryo to smiling life by fucking him under the wise gaze of the kneeling spirit woman, but that gift of his life force appears to sap all the naked lover's strength, or maybe life. Nude Ryo then hoists his love over his shoulder, to bear him out of the cave and across the wasteland ... to a final scene where they are happily alive in bed together and the boxer stands at their bedroom window beside the spirit. It all looked more graceful and lovelier to behold than the clumsy preceding summary is.

The film's black-and-white photography is outstanding, the over-reaching aspirations of the writer-director have to be admired, but the length he went to express them is ludicrous and unjustified. Mexico's truncated version may not have expurgated fake sex and full nudity; it may merely have eliminated repetitions and longeurs.

I wouldn't watch the long version again, but am glad I saw it once. In future, a dominant producer with determined scissors could help this director make fine art.

Harry Potter 7-I

It's disturbing to feel disappointed by a movie that friends and millions of other people admired, turning Part I of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (HP7) into another blockbuster, earning more than US$900 million globally at the box office (with DVD rentals and sales yet to start). As only 51 out of 237 reviewers in the Rotten Tomatoes lists (22%) agreed with me, let's note some positive aspects first.

Director David Yates continues where he left off in HP6, showcasing the development of the saga's dark side in line with JK Rowling's story, with the screenplay again written by Steve Kloves. The Texan has worked on nothing else for a decade, and can now start doing his own things again (with a track record including the adaptation of Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys in 2000, and writing and directing Flesh and Bone, 1993, and The Fabulous Baker Boys, 1989). In terms of transferring the best bare bones from the seven books, he's pleased everyone (most importantly, Rowling).

The cast regulars do their usual thing well too, though the core trio often look ill at ease away from Hogwarts for the first time, cast into mournful settings that appear to be menacing colour-washed landscapes a la Scottish or Viking ghost tales rather than The Lord of the Rings. All other surviving regular cast members have brief walk-on parts to play, other than Ralph Fiennes, whose Voldemort has gained vigour and fuller facial features.

In past episodes, one of the pleasures lay in watching new-to-the-plot characters gaining credence from British acting stars. The only major one this time is Welsh Rhys Ifans as kooky Irish Luna's father. Unfortunately, his role is one slim thread in Rowling's increasingly complex patchwork plot of symbolic artifacts, magic potions, Latin incantations and evil powers (which soon eliminated Bill Nighy as a new po-faced, short-lived Minister of Magic).

More successful was the trio of middle-aged character actors whose identities were commandeered by the three youngsters in order to enter the Ministry's secret underground halls (sporting hosts of actors and deliciously Kafaesque set designs). All three were well cast for the tricky task of representing the young stars' body language: TV and movie character actor (The Departed and 49 other title credits) David O'Hara is Scottish, UK TV series regular Steffan Rhodri (Gavin & Stacey) is Welsh, and Sophie Thompson is Emma's younger sister, an award-winner on stage (Into the Woods) and film (Gosford Park), and English.

The overall mumbo-jumbo of Horcruxes, magic swords, figures from ancient children's fables, and agents of death reached a mind-numbing, multi-level in Rowling's final volume. She also had the tough narrative task of keeping romantic feelings simmering among her three leads, which the actors do their best to represent in some of the film series' cheapest-looking and least-ornamented settings (a secretly-big tent from Hermione's bottomless bag). Hermione's piano lesson for Ron, the dance to a radio pop tune by Harry and Hermione, and Ron's departure in a huff, are all almost cringe-making, especially as the audience knows that Ron will return, still burning with inexpressible desire for Hermione.

Even the SFX were mostly unsurprising, as seen in 2D. Maybe Voldemort's carnivorous snake and his racing black clouds of evil were more exciting in 3D. Maybe the screened version I saw was badly truncated (running around 8 minutes shorter than the official version). Whatever the reasons, HP7-I didn't excite me as story, movie experience or penultimate HP film.

Buried

Buried had a reported budget of US$2-3 million and grossed more than $18 million globally by the end of 2010, before its DVD release. It's a winning calling card for its Spanish director, Rodrigo Cortes, and lead actor, Ryan Reynolds. And for the concept-creating producers who arranged their association and, thereby gained official Spanish (Catalan) and Canadian credits.

A third key factor was employing Chris Sparling to write the movie, which won him the USA's National Board of Review 2010 award for best original screenplay, unintentionally encouraging other writers to take commercially offbeat scripts abroad to get them made. (But gauche Sparling committed a Hollywood faux pas when he urged Oscar voters to nominate his screenplay.)

One can imagine Hollywood bean-counters' reactions to the concept of a kidnapped 30-year-old married American lorry driver held for ransom in Iraq, buried in a coffin-sized box with few items capable of illuminating him and advancing the story.

It's obvious to an audience and the driver that time and the oxygen in the box will soon run out. The kidnapper, speaking with him via the cellphone, is ruthlessly demanding, and phone contacts with the outside world are frustrated or frustrating. Other movies have exploited claustrophobia and imminent death threats, but this one does so with perverse black humour a la Hitchcock, depicting brutal corporate and political realities unimaginable in feel-good Hollywood entertainment.

Frequent lapses into total blackness, during which audiences only hear Reynold's curses, sobs, snores and coughs, intensify the dramatic intensity of this portrayal of a condemned man's emotions. The movie never leaves the box setting throughout its 90 minutes of life-maintaining air. On a DVD, this can become tedious rather than riveting, and I can imagine the movie is even more effective on the big screen, shared with other spectators "trapped" in their cinema seats, not knowing if the man can be rescued.

Sparling, previously known only for writing and acting in shorts and a home-made comedy, crafted a screenplay with a cunning blend of suspenseful tricks. The super-cynical sting in the story's tale is reason enough for Sparling's award. First-time feature director Cortes also edited the images with mature stylishness, and the cinematography by another relative newcomer, Eduard Grau, shows why Ford chose the young Barcelona man as his directory of photography for A Solitary Man.

There were few slips in the scenario's logical flow. Only one trick was a little too convenient to be credible. The kidnapper had provided the driver with a Zippo lighter and a Blackberry at the start, which made sense from his point of view. After 40 minutes, though when those two spasmodic sources of light stopped providing interesting angles and shadows, the driver discovers a bag containing glow-sticks and a torchlight (red or white light), plus a sharp penknife that enables two further plot developments.

They all work out acceptably, though, in the ever-increasing tempo of fear and despair. Adding mildly horroric tension are low-key mood-setting music, a fanged sand snake slithering into the box, and an overhead bombing that leads to broken timber planks in the box's roof and periodic trickles of sand.

Abjuring flashbacks, and only including one short, relevant phone video from the outside world, the movie stays in the confines of the box the whole time. Voices off - for mechanical phone operators, the vengeful anti-invasion kidnapper, the truck company's legalistic personnel department, and the official hostage-rescue team's professionally friendly liaison officer - are disembodied images of bureaucracy, spin and indifference. Through them, the morals of the story are explained.

Vancouver-born Ryan Reynolds grabbed this chance to prove his acting ability. A teenage Nickleodeon TV series performer who later got a few parts in Hollywood, Reynolds was better known as the fiance (for two years, 2004-6) of fellow-Canadian singer (and Nickleodeon artiste) Alanis Morisette, then as the husband for two years (2008-10) of actress Scarlett Johansson. He (and his movie stand-in) can now sleep better at night, unless he dreams about the time he spent making this breakthrough movie.

You will meet ...

Does Woody Allen bother to read the reviews for his films? Perhaps only to sharpen his ageing sense of angst, because he must know that one of his feebler efforts will usually be one of the year's best-crafted cinematic confections. In 2010's You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, he's in London again, for the fourth time, after a break in Barcelona (though still using Spanish government backing according to the end credits).

His 2005-7 output in London comprised Match Point, Scoop and Cassandra's Dream, all of which were also delightful confections. None of them had Allen's old Bergmanesque intensity, all of them were the modern cinematic equivalent of Noel Coward drawing room comedies of manners. Once again, too, Allen attracts the cream of movie acting to play cameo roles that depend on revelatory facial expressiveness, comedic wit, perfect timing and voluble body language. Those skills are what good actors love to display.

Two American imports reveled in the chance to portray subtly selfish characters. Josh Brolin is a failed novelist, Antonio Banderas a philandering art gallery owner. As Brolin's wife, working for Banderas, Australian-reared Naomi Watts reverts to her native English accent and frazzled state of mind, while Bombay-born Frieda Pinto glows as Brolin's neighbour and new love, confirming that Danny Boyle chose well when he picked her for Slumdog Millionaire's female lead.

Two British veterans shine, with Welsh-born Anthony Hopkins (now 73) underplaying ideally as a rich old man pandering to a call-girl, and Gemma Jones (68, also with Welsh ancestry) relishing the story's key role as his despairing ex-wife. Each of them has a perfectly-cast English supporting actress for their wryly comic set-pieces: Pauline Collins (now 70) as the wife's amiable fortune-teller and Brit TV regular Lucy Punch (recently in Hollywood for Dinner with Schmucks). Punch was tapped for the juicy as Hopkin's curvaceous and frightfully-common trophy wife when Nicole Kidman had to drop out, and Punch is clearly in heaven, rolling her eyes, vowels and hips with pantomimic stylishness.

Each pairing leads to a deliberately focused, silent exchange of facial flickers when the characters sense their loving needs and feelings. It's clear why Allen must be a dream director for many; and a galaxy of excellent movie and TV character actors took small supporting parts (such as Christian Me & Orson Welles Mackay, Ewan Trainspotting Bremner, Anna Pushing Daisies Friel). American Zak Orth, a bit-part player in Allen's Barcelona, provides a non-whiny Allenesque voice-over of links and hints. Spanish cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe also worked on Barcelona, and brings carefully-lit magic to scenic London streets and locations.

As always in an Allen movie, the music soundtrack is an appropriate but never distracting blend of jazz, Mozart, opera and sentimental love songs. Even the opening and closing credits maintain Allen's distinctive plainness of white on black. Maybe Allen doesn't titillate his critics any more, but his screenplays continue to show a special awareness of human self-doubts, and good actors' ability to represent them. His direction continues to do what he does best: entertain.

Sorcerer's apprentice

Jerry Bruckheimer [JB] is a highly successful Hollywood producer (Cold Case, CSI, Amazing Race and many more series for TV; Pirates of the Caribbean, Beverly Hills Cop and National Treasure series, Blackhawk Down, Pearl Harbour, Top Gun, Armageddon, Flashdance and many more blockbusters). That means he can afford to take an occasional loss, which he deserved to do for organising such a woefully-misconceived copycat action-adventure as The Sorcerer's Apprentice [TSA].

The bomb had a budget of US$150 million; it grossed only US$63 million at the North American box office. Yet, fortunately for his co-producers, and confirming Bruckheimer's showbiz shrewdness, its total 2010 global earnings, including DVD sales, were more than US$234 million. It almost broke even on the bottom line.

Bruckheimer is also a loyal associate for talents he likes, especially those that bring in the bucks. He's worked frequently with such directors as Michael Bay and the two Scott brothers; his favourite actors include Denzel Washington, Will Smith, and Tom Cruise and Colin Farrell in their early years. For TSA, he re-hired the director and lead actor of his National Treasure series, Jon Turteltaub and Nicholas Cage (who also starred in JB's The Rock, directed by Bay, as well as Gone in 60 Seconds and Con Air).

Consequently, it's fair to guess that JB knew exactly what he was concocting with TSA's lead story writers, the veteran duo of Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal (Star Trek VI, Superman IV, Planet of the Apes, etc). He added a younger third creator, Matt Lopez, fresh, not that it's an appropriate word, from dreaming up Race to Witch Mountain, to head up a trio of screenplay writers, alongside the equally young writing partnership of Doug Miro and Carlo Bernard (who also worked together at the same time on JB's dire Prince of Persia).

At this point, it will be clear that JB was planning for an action-adventure movie in which lead actor Cage would have young assistants, thus appealing to key audience segments. Cage would be a senior super-magician, which was a doddle for him as he was playing a similar role around the same time in Kick-Ass, a Brit movie that wasn't likely to be a market challenger in America.

Cage presumably can demand more than a few million to headline a project, his market-drawing appeal a proven winner, even though he can be one of Hollywood's laziest actors (often kindly called laid-back). He's either revved up to a degree dependent on his directors' sensitivity (ideally in Herzog's Bad Lieutenant) or he's coasting in neutral, frowning inexpressively (as he is in TSA). JB's budget therefore needed a couple of inexpensive youngsters as The Young Apprentice and The Gorgeous Girlfriend.

Canadian actor Jay Baruchel had just worked with Ben Stiller on two films (Tropic Thunder and Night at the Museum) and, although he was almost 30, he looked young enough. His multi-ethnic ancestry created a face that might attract desire (among girls) or identification (among young males), if audiences were prepared to overlook a dead expression, twisted mouth and bad acting. His height-fearing female fellow-adventurer was better cast, Australian model/actress Teresa (December Boys, Bedtime Stories) handling the limited role effectively.

A baddy or two, JB? Of course, and there's Alfred Molina, who'd played a jealous genius before (Spider-Man 2) and was already working for JB in Prince of Persia. He's not a cheap hire now either, but his wicked young apprentice could be and, lo and behold JB, there's another Englishman we can lift off the Prince sets, Toby Kebbell, who can be made to look and sound summink like Russell Brand, so that's the English market covered, innit?

What about the European market? Well, JB, there's this Italian actress that's made a lot of French films and she was in two Matrix movies, and the name of Monica Bellucci will look good on European mastheads; she can play Cage's long-lost/trapped beautiful old girlfriend. American matrons will admire her too. A black? Of course JB, what about the obese youngster Omar Benson Miller from your Miami branch of the CSI franchise? And we've included cameo roles for a couple of Chinese faces, and a pair of small parts for older faces (an old witch and Merlin). So what's left, JB?

Of course, special effects, and that's where JB spent big as usual, putting his producers' money "on the big screen", employing hundreds of experienced technicians to replicate tricks from their previous work on the Batman, Matrix, Potter and other visual-effects epics. Wow, JB, someone said, why don't we reverse-animate the Sorcerer's Apprentice tricks with real CGI brooms and floods like Disney had in the original Fantasia? Old folks will love telling their kids about that after the movie? We'll put other quotes like that on show too, JB.

Okay, JB finally cried, perhaps, enough with the cliches! I need to hold some in store for my next productions. Another Cage/Turtletaub/JB bomb is surely on its assembly line already.