Inside job

Director Charles (No End in Sight Oscar nominee) Ferguson uttered a bitter "Firstly" head-note before accepting his 2011 Best Documentary Oscar for Inside Job. Three years after the worst financial crisis in 70 years and the biggest set of frauds in its history, he stated, the US finance industry has not seen a single member go to jail.

Ferguson's angry documentary report is a damning brief for America's prosecutors. The chances of them acting on its expose of systemic corruption are as slim as a threadbare dollar bill. So-called victimless crime is part of the American social fabric and a keystone of its economy, which lost US$20 trillion because of it in 2008, losses (in savings, jobs and homes) borne by few in the upper ranks of the financial industry itself.

Matt Damon lent (or rented, at union rates, probably) his liberal voice to the documentary as its narrator, and a pair of young documentary editors, Chad Beck (No End in Sight) and Adam Bolt (The Recruiter), joined Ferguson in the writing of the well-researched script (whose filming locations included Iceland, Paris and China).

Many of the guilty parties can be identified from the many captions noting that they refused to be interviewed. They will be glad they didn't when they see the mess a pair of top US economics professors get into when they try to skate past their well-paid PR work for the finance industry.

As Ferguson illustrates, the Obama administration is as much a Wall Street puppet as any of the preceding administrations since Donald Regan initiated Ronald Reagan's unleashing of the deregulation demons. Ferguson also goads defenders of the status quo by comparing bonus-addicted financiers to coke addicts and users of another service industry, prostitution. He points out that US government lawyers were happy to use personal failings to strip power from fraud-fighting Eliot Spitzer, but not from any criminal merchant banker, hedge fund manager, industry regulator, credit ratings agency or Washington politico.

Iceland's microcosmic case study is an opening blast that reveals the absurd dimensions of post-Reaganomics financial and governance delusions. As the French finance minister comments pithily about the Lehman collapse, "Holy cow". Forcing Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy sparked recognition of the so-called Financial Crisis, and the ritual slaughter of Wall Street's least-loved villain is a detective thriller awaiting another documentary feature. The media's gorging on lobbyists' lies, advertising revenue and bribes is another area not covered by Ferguson in this indictment of a cabal of financial, academic and political fraudsters who've controlled the US for more than three decades for the benefit of only themselves and their clans.

A frightening horror movie, Inside Job reminds its viewers that another crisis is inevitable, but it's preaching to a small choir, even with an Oscar to give it a little extra light.

Monsters

Does anybody now make a movie that isn't in two parts or primed for a sequel? It is very irritating for a movie-goer to be left in mid-air, feeling defrauded of the price of the second part's ticket. Especially, as with Monsters, when the first part has too clearly been spun out, a half-hour or more longer than its material justifies, in order to run a minimally acceptable hour and a half.

It's more than irritating when a way-above-average B feature is a one-man showpiece of excellence from its British writer, director, SFX director and cinematographer, Gareth Edwards. It may be only half a calling card, but his debut movie was his open sesame to Hollywood fortune and has already gained him the director's chair for the Godzilla remake.

A previous award co-winner and nominee for TV programmes' SFX (Hiroshima, Perfect Disaster), Edwards attracted a budget of less than of half a million dollars for his concept of extra-terrestrial octopoid monsters confined to an infected zone in northern Mexico, with a new great wall guarding the USA. Although Peter Jackson-backed District 9 had triumphed at the box-office despite placing its caged ETs in South Africa, Edwards wisely set his scifi thriller in the American hemisphere.

After a battle between US aircraft and the creatures on the southern border of the zone, a photojournalist is ordered to bring his boss's affianced daughter back home. They encounter all the usual transportation problems, corruption and jungle settings, and Edwards' producers knew the pair of lead actors, on-screen throughout the movie, would make or break its credibility. Experienced TV actor Scoot McNairy was a shrewd casting choice: he'd recently (2007) won an Indie acting award for the baby-budget (US$15,000) In Search of a Midnight Kiss.

He is a credibly egocentric photojournalist, although his relaxed facial image projects gormlessness rather than sensitivity. Almost too good to be true is the production note claiming that his then girlfriend, current wife, was offered the co-lead to better ensure an on-screen rapport: TV actress and movie bit-parter Whitney Able. A gamin lookalike for Cameron Diaz, she is both charismatic and very credible as a young woman finding her own life.

Edwards' location cinematography is excellent too, and his SFX of rampaging gleaming octopi, forest trees' trunks of their translucent eggs, and bomb-scarred Central American settlements are top-quality. His piece de resistance is the coupling of a pair of multi-limbed octopi over an abandoned gas station, where the two humans watch them, transfixed a la Strange Encounters, prompted uncontrollably to have their first passionate kiss - just before the screen fades to black and this audience's irritation point. The irritation is knowing that one wants to know what happens to the sensuous octopi. Which reminds me: there must be a second part for District 9. Please.

Megamind

In its manic effort to not be viewed as a complete rip-off of The Incredibles, Despicable Me et al, Megamind has a plethora of assumed, stolen, lost and confused identities. Keeping up with them is child's play for children, frustrating for adults when the born-good gone-bad ET (Megamind, voiced by Will Ferrell) and his piranha-like lifelong Minion, encased in a fish tank, (David Cross) kills arch-rival born-good ET, Metro Man (Brad Pitt).

Having gained control of Metrocity (cutely mispronounced), having no foe or purpose in life, Megamind is encouraged to cheer himself up by a female TV news reporter (Tina Fey) who loved Metro Man. He transforms himself into a humble city librarian, Bernard (Ben Stiller, who co-exec-prodded the movie), who then becomes a new evil character, Titan aka cutely as Tighten (Jonah Hill), formed from the body of Hal, Roxanne's cameraman and unrequited lover. Meantime, Minion has become warden of the prison (JK Simmons) where Megamind was raised, while Metro Man hadn't died, merely retiring from the unfulfilling task of doing good, compelling Megamind to take on the role himself. I have no recollection of any morsel of screenplay that explained when and how the two ETs went to school together.

The first credited co-writer, Alan Schoolcraft, had been a production executive (1998-2001) for three Coen brothers comic movies - The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou and The Man Who Wasn't There. His next credit, and first for writing, is this film. His co-writer, Brent Simons, is also a first-timer, which is no excuse for the screenplay's lack of originality.

Nevertheless, the film is frothy fun, probably exciting fun in 3D, and much credit must go presumably to director Tom McGrath, who made the two Madagascar cartoon comedies and learned his craft on TV's Ren & Stimpy Show in the mid-90s. Another experienced pair of hands brought on board was that of composer Hans Zimmer. Justin Theroux (an actor/writer who'd worked with Stiller on Tropic Thunder) is one credited "creative consultant"; director Guillermo (Pan's Labyrinth) del Toro is the other (and he's now working on a handful of other Dreamworks Animation projects).

Major credit, as for any animated movie, goes to the hundreds of specialist talents who managed to make this Dreamworks copycat effort fun to watch. One hopes they got their fair share of its mega-mind-numbing US$130 million budget.

Stool pigeon

Good car chases and shoot-outs. Swishing machetes and gory wounds. Psychologically damaged characters on either side of the law. Hong Kong action movies have been there and done that many times, and writer-director Dante Lam needed a fresh plot element in 2010. So he constructed a screenplay about police informants as unsung anti-heroes in The Stool Pigeon.

In a previous multi-award-winner, The Beast Stalker, Lam had worked with the same screenplay writer Jack Ng and lead actors Nick Cheung and Nicholas Tse. The plot for their reunion is different enough to interest audiences and not be too surprising.

Cheung is a police inspector and experienced user of paid informants. The script includes many references to the two-sided exploitation, starting with a lengthy opening scene showing how circumstances obliged Cheung to expose an informant to almost certain death. This serves a key marketing purpose of providing a hyper-ham role for one of Hong Kong's hammiest supporting actors, Liu (Kill Zone) Kai-chi. Saved from death by luck, he is later found, a mad beggar, hiding himself from his wife and child, befriended secretly by the policeman.

Cheung's newest spy is a petty criminal newly released from prison, shaven-headed Nicholas Tse, a road-racer Cheung hopes will be recruited by a long-wanted goldshop-robber, providing a dubbed role for the mainland's commanding Lu (Aftershock) Yi . Cheung helps his man gain acceptance, offering him the chance to pay off his father's million-dollar debt, thereby freeing his sister from a life of prostitution.

When Tse joins the gang, he discovers that he'd met the chief's girlfriend before (in a brilliantly-staged flashback using overhead cameras to show two people fleeing cops and robbers on roads that meet, enabling the pair to escape). Taiwanese Kwei (Ocean Heaven) Lun-mai delivers another bravado offbeat performance, and her character's decision to swap loyalties is made credible by her and the script. She'd also worked on The Beast Stalker.

Far less credible is the secondary female interest, presumably attached to the plot in order to employ a leading mainland actress, Miao Pu. Her thankless role, portrayed very touchingly, is that of the policeman's lame and amnesiac wife, who'd attempted suicide and now works as a receptionist at a dance school where her unrecognised husband visits her. That's bad enough as an irrelevant plot device. It gets worse when her father and brother attack the inspector.

Lam's speedy direction and good editing allow audiences to accelerate past such roadblocks, and admire a lot of strong details in the settings and characterisations. As in all Hong Kong movies co-produced with mainland companies, we know that justice will prevail, good sinners will redeem themselves while their bad kin will die deaths of a hundred cuts, no leading sinners will speak Mandarin, and baddies never use the mainland as their base. Dante Lam's skills ensure that such an obligatory fairy-tale framework stands up well in this above-average action-thriller.

Tourist

The most irritating aspect of The Tourist is that it's a remake, obliging a conscientious movie lover to hunt down and compare the original 2005 French thriller, Jerome Salle's Anthony Zimmer, starring Sophie Marceau and Yvan Attal. It shouldn't matter if a remake is a good or bad remake, as it should be judged on its own merit. But, when it's a failure, one wants to find out if the fault is in the design rather than the execution. That's movie-loving conscientiousness: silly, but more satisfying than just slagging off the remake.

First the slags, though. The Golden Globes clique were half-right to nominate The Tourist in their comedy category, since the movie's producers clearly thought they were creating a romantic comedy. Unfortunately, they also created one of the decade's least effective rom-coms, as it is impossible to believe that Angelina Jolie's super-tough Lara Crofty British police secret agent would fall head over heels for Johnny Depp's milk-sop American math teacher. Think of coupling Sophia Loren and Mr Bean, duh.

The plot depends on that dubious premise. Jolie hasn't seen her adored English financier for a year, since he snatched a fortune from a Brit gangster (Steven Berkoff in non-typical muted mode), when he tells her to take a train to Venice and pick up any man who looks like him, to decoy the gangster's Russian henchmen and British police and tax agents chasing him (led by an irritable but not fiery Paul Bettany, under the minimalist supervision of a muted Timothy Dalton). The man she picks is a teacher, a lightly bearded widower from the boondocks, he says, but we, the audience, know that he will be her old love, even though the screenplay tells us he's now four inches shorter and had a multi-million-dollar facial rearrangement. Jolie's character doesn't see or sense the similarity, duh.

Jolie herself knew very well what she was doing when she signed on with the movie's re-maker, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (an already-abbreviated name hereinafter to be called vonD), whose previous and first feature (2006) was a German mega-award-winner he also wrote, The Lives of Others. On the strength of that global BAFTA-winning art-house hit, vonD gained production funds for his first English-language movie. Entering the big time, he apparently play safe by re-making the recent French caper, and Jolie probably saw what a glossy vehicle it had been for Marceau, and asked for it to be re-written with a British context, as she does do a good English accent.

Depp can do many things very well, but it must be supposed that he put himself on heavy-duty muting medication the first day he joined Jolie on a set. VonD appears to have thought he could make a Hitchcockian crime caper, a romantic comedy in the league of Donen's Charade. There is no way that an apprentice director is able to tell Jolie a la Hitchcock that she's just a cow to be given standing markers. She surely ran this movie show, which spends much of its time staring at her (giving her the prima diva air of a Loren or Callas) when it isn't gazing equally lovingly (and even more justifiably) at the beauty of Venice seen from the air or its canals.

For this film (unlike The King's Speech), Julian Fellowes was given, or chose to accept, a co-writer credit, for presumably adding a credible British society detail or two to vonD's rewrite of the Salle original, which was also tweaked by another Oscar winner, Christopher (Usual Suspects) McQuarrie. They are further indicators of why this cinematic trifle had a budget of $100 million; Jolie and Venice get the credit for grossing a quarter of a billion dollars globally. VonD may be happy; Depp will shrug, if he's come off the medication.

Outrage

Takeshi Kitano is a leading Japanese film and TV industry character and charismatic screen personality (as "Beat" Takeshi). The multi-talented Kitano's early film directions created a distinctive "deadpan" style of glossy, black-comic and violent portraits of yakusa gangsters and corrupt police (Violent Cop, Boiling Point, Sonatine), starring himself as a man of few words and harsh action. In 2010, after a decade of unpopular experimentation with other forms, he returned to his crime metier with Outrage, a stereotypical gangland movie with a few cinematographic flourishes.

They mostly comprise fixed or panning distance shots of lines of sleek limousines, on otherwise empty highways or parked outside gangster mansions. The opening scene is the most memorable: a long tracking shot of black-suited yakusa drivers and henchmen awaiting the emergence of their family bosses from a yakusa council meeting. Kitano's expressionless face is one among many, all silently conveying the extent and menacing power of the gangs, whose carefully structured world is as far from reality as that of fedual royalty or corporate tycoons.

Throughout the film, only one detective is seen questioning the yakusas, and he's immediately established as a paid-off associate, and an old schoolpal of Kitano's character. He has a name, as do all the gangsters, and the four families they belong to, but for a non-Japanese it is difficult to develop a clear understanding of who's who and which of them is a blood brother or son of whom. All be-suited and seriously treacherous, they can only be distinguished by the actors' facial quirks, and it isn't worth trying to know their names: they don't matter.

Kitano, who wrote, edited and directed the movie (in his usual omnipotent fashion), gave himself a central character with a surprising level of gullibility, and loyalties almost as divided as those of his yakusa rivals and henchmen. One by one, the yakusa chief arranges the slaughter of competing families, only to be slayed at the end by his own badly-treated lieutenant. In between, gangsters are stabbed with a dental drill and chopsticks, shot in a train and many limousines, machine-gunned, beheaded by a speeding rope and have many finger ends sliced off. The only outsider involved, apart from slain call girls and waiters, is an African country's ambassador tricked into turning his embassy into a casino. He survives, digging a grave for a family boss.

As that scene illustrates, this is a minimally credible movie Kitano may have made out of financial necessity. It isn't a worthy use of his old multi-talents. He's still a charismatic presence, but the light has faded.

King's speech

Some American members of the Oscar voting panels may not enjoy giving their top awards to foreigners, but in some years they have no other credible options. In 2011, they should honour Colin Firth (English) and Geoffrey Rush (Australian) for their Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor performances in The King's Speech.

They should be shoo-ins: their major competitors are a Spaniard (Javier Bardem, Biutiful) and another Brit (Christian Bale, The Fighter). Firth seems unbeatable: Bardem already has an Oscar (Best Supporting Actor, No Country for Old Men) and Firth should have won the previous year (A Single Man). It will be a sweet victory for him, slapping down Jeff Bridges (True Grit), whose victory the previous year (Crazy Heart) owed more to Hollywood sentimentality than great cinema. Rush cannot be so confident: he's already won once (Best Actor, Shine) while Bale is still an unrewarded veteran and box-office superstar, this being his first Oscar nomination. If he loses, Rush will be consoled by his executive-production stake in the very profitable movie.

Oscar's US voters may assuage their national pride by declaring The Black Swan and Darren Aronofsky the Best Picture and Director of the year (2010), even though King's Speech director Tom Hooper created the BAFTA award-winner in the Best Film category. However, Hooper didn't get the BAFTA for Best Director, which the Brit academy gave to David Fincher (for The Social Network). It is a good year for mainstream movie direction, the field also including the Coen brothers (True Grit), Danny Boyle (127 Hours), Christopher Nolan (Inception) and David O. Russell (The Fighter).

Hooper has collected an armful of awards for his direction of The King's Speech, but it isn't his "turn" to be given an Oscar. He's less than 40 years old, he's another Englishman, and much of his previous award-winning work (Prime Suspect 6, Elizabeth I, John Adams) has been in TV, which Hollywood still pooh-poohs despite the rise of HBO and other quality cable channels. Yet it is Hooper's direction that transforms a sow's ear of a screenplay into a cinematic silk purse.

A tongue-tied royal stammerer, pre-WWII Britain's Duke of York, known to his family as "Bertie" (stiff-upper-lipped Firth) is induced by his sweetly capable wife Elizabeth (twinkle-eyed Helena Bonham-Carter) into trying out one more speech therapist, an Australian rough diamond, Lionel Logue (Rush). His cavernous consulting rooms in Harley Street are a set designer's joy of stained wallpaper, high ceilings and minimalist furniture. His techniques are effectively avant-garde: bizarre bodily exercises to adjust vocal mechanisms, usage of recording discs, swearing games, shouting and dancing, self-confidence self-trickery.

The Duke's need to deliver speeches without stuttering becomes urgent when his bullying father, King George V (Michael Gambon) nears death, more so when his elder brother, David (Guy Pearce, with an upper-classy accent betraying the actor's Australian origin) philanders with an American divorcee. Obliged to abdicate by government leaders - Stanley Baldwin (Anthony Andrews), Winston Churchill (Timothy Spall), Archbishop Lang (Derek Jacobi) - David, now Edward VII, drops the poisoned chalice of kingship into his younger brother's unwilling hands.

London-raised Anglo-American screenwriter David Seidler weaves a flimsy fabric from historical facts, society gossip, class distinctions, colonial prejudices and the popular pretence that a royal family is merely a group of untrained actors muddling along like any family of unskilled misfits would. None of the royals are portrayed with convincingly imposing superiority complexes (Gambon, and Claire Bloom as his wife Queen Mary, getting closest), and the Duchess of York's toying with the novelty of a lift door looks like one of the cute "human" touches that might be ascribed to Julian (Gosford Park, Downton Abbey) Fellowes, a credited co-writer presumably hired to enhance the original screenplay.

Seidler, previously best known in Hollywood for his work on Tucker (1988), has won awards for co-writing (nearly always with Jacqueline Feather) various US TV dramas (Onassis, My Father My Son). They've also collaborated on many animated movie scripts, and Seidler reportedly found inspiration in the speech therapy drama from his own teenage stammering impediment.

In true Hollywood fashion, he presents the therapy sessions as the key dramatic element, using the "buddy movie" approach. Bertie and Lionel become an odd couple, with understanding (and under-written) wives and children. They squabble about a shilling, argue in public, drink together, share confidences, end their friendship, apologise to each other, and end up friends for life. Logue certainly found a job for life: the end credits tell us he joined King George VI for all his speeches.

Various plot details are dubious factually: the royal couple making an unchaperoned visit to Logue's home, Bertie being able to visit Logue daily without protection, Logue being given constant access and only having his qualifications checked at the last minute by the Archbishop, the ducal pair watching a newsreel of Hitler speechifying dramatically. Wisely, although Logue's grandson Mark wrote a book about "How One Man Saved the British Monarchy", the movie only makes passing references to the fate of Germany and Russian emperors. Instead, it presents a tale of one man's battle with his handicap.

The King's Speech is a good old-fashioned bioepic, buddy movie and sickness tale. Firth's surest sign of Oscar glory are the director's sympathetic close-ups of a stammering man: Hollywood's actor-voters love to see themselves portraying the afflicted.

[The movie, best actor, director and screenplay awards were won.]

Any human heart

British TV's Channel 4, one of the world's few sources of quality English-language filmed drama, maintains BBC-calibre standards of screenwriting, production values, and period stylishness. Its latest (2010) saga was Any Human Heart, William Boyd's adaptation of his own 2002 best-seller novel.

Through a set of memoirs, the life of an Anglo-Scottish writer (Logan Mountstuart) is used to represent aspects of intellectual life, literary ambitions and social mores from the 1930s onwards. It's the world, as Boyd portrays it, of the pre-WW2 privileged and moneyed classes, at university, in the Bloomsbury Set, around Paris and in London. It's the world of Hemingway (Julian Ovenden), the Duke (Tom Hollander) and Duchess (Gillian Anderson) of Windsor, and the fictional friends and lovers of the fictional writer, who also crosses paths with Winston Churchill and Ian Fleming (as spymaster).

Boyd excises various characters from his novel, such as Virginia Woolf, and concentrates attention on three periods of his central figure: young naif and lover (Sam Pillars of the Earth Claflin), middle-aged success and lover (Matthew Pride and Prejudice Macfadyen) and solitary old man (Jim Broadbent, stealing the screen, as always). Different actors portray stages of his best friends' lives in the upper class and Anglo-Jewry (including Samuel West and Ed The Pianist Stoppard). The main man's female interests are similar figures of historical import: Labour party activist, rustic lass, aristocrat, friend's wife (Kim Catrall) and true love (Hayley Pillars, The Duchess Atwell).

They're all part of the 5-hour 4-part series' basic flaw: its plot looks and feels too much like a fill-in-the-boxes DIY period-piece, a recycle of British/TV drama material from BBC dramatisations (usually by Andrew Davies) of every family saga ever written, lush Merchant Ivory movies, all the Brontes, Galsworthys, Waughs and Poliakoffs, and Upstairs, Downstairs and its derivatives. Boyd probably wrote a much more nuanced historical novel; it would be worth reading to find out, the next time I'm stuck beside a pool for a few days.

Piranha

Every now and then, as rarely as sensitivities can allow, every movie lover must see an incredibly bad, disgustingly commercial, cliche-bespattered load of derivative cinematic offal. They don't make Showgirls every year, and its ilk are therefore treasured movie experiences.

Such an abomination is the sort of cineplex fodder one would expect from the Mr Hyde side of the Weinstein brothers, who delivered its first part in 2010 as Piranha 3D. Its special effects, of packs of blood-thirsty prehistoric piranha fish hunting nubile young bodies on their Spring Break, are so credibly good that the movie ends up being so gory it's wonderfully comic.

Credit must go where it's deserved, to Alexandre The Hills Have Eyes Aja, a "Splat Pack" horror movie director and son of French producer Alexandre Arcady, who funded his son's first two directing efforts, Furia (1999) and Haute Tension (2003).

Although Piranha is a re-make of Joe Dante's 1978 classic horror, Jaws was clearly the prime inspiration for the two credited "writers", Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg, a pair of TV talents whose prior movie was also a remake-cum-spoof, Sorority Row. This time, just in case no one sees the connection, the spoof's opening pre-credits scene shows Richard Dreyfuss fishing in a lake when an underwater earthquake unleashes a swarm of piranha and the conclusion of Dreyfuss's bit part.

It is hoped he collected a small fortune for such prostitution of his name and cinematic heritage. Ditto for Christopher Lloyd, who trundles his bug eyes into an aquarium set where he is the mildly mad boffin reincarnated from Back to the Future. Also resurrected from that classic is Elizabeth Shue, now the right age to play the sheriff who's the mother of three children, assisted by Ving Rhames as her deputy, who gets a Tarantino moment to wield a frantic piranha-killing machine (an outboard motor).

That's the oldie, feminist and black markets catered for: what's left? TV regular Jerry O'Connell continues to show that he never lived up to his promising start in movies (Stand By Me, 1986). His role as a camp straight porn film director is a highlight of ham in a film in which the acting is deliberately super-porcine (one assumes the acting technique didn't arise naturally, being kind to some of the actors).

Horror movie buffs would have been tickled gorily pink by the guest appearance of another "Splat Pack" director, Eli Hostel Roth, as a short-lived wet-shirt show host. Those shirts, and languid subaqua lesbian dance routines, were designed for hordes of pubescent porno fans, as was well-boobed English actress Kelly Brook.

Various young actors get the chance to flex muscles, grins and puppy fat: Cody Longo and Steven R McQueen have screen names to die for and acting abilities to unleash herds of cringes. There may have been some Latino extras in the blood-soaked white-fleshed waters of the Arizonan lake setting, but there seemed to be no blacks, possibly because their skin tones would have clashed with the set designers' red-hued colour scheme.

There were moments in that watery blood-fest when I laughed in manic disbelief. Have you ever seen a girl's bloody body suddenly break in two? Or watched two piranhas scrapping over a very distended circumcised penis, which the winner disgustedly expels undigested? Or a headful of female hair trapped in a speedboat's engine, causing its owner to be scalped?

There are more tributes and bows to horror and comedy movies than any movie buff can catch the first time, all gleefully packed into 80 minutes (and a budget of only $24 million). The remake ends with a slap-in-the-face promo that will have all lobotomised movie buffs salivating at the thought of 2011's release of Piranha 3DD.

The baby fish in this first instalment were excellent teeth-gnashing tail-whipping hi-speed tricks of the CGI trade, but the next school of fish will obviously be really big whoppers for one woman, her three kids and a single girl to battle. It's hard to know whether to sigh or cheer at the news that this first Piranha "only" grossed $80 million globally.

Shake hands with the devil

"Blame Belgium" is one simplistic message to be drawn from a docudrama presenting the memoir of the retired Canadian United Nations general (1993-4) in Rwanda, whose Shake Hands with the Devil was subtitled "The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda".

The movie version, directed by Ottawa-born Roger (48 Hrs, Turner & Hooch, Tomorrow Never Dies, And the Band Played On) Spottiswoode, is a grim reminder that some European colonists left a bigger mess than they'd found when they arrived in far-flung corners of the world. Of course, the whole sorry saga of Rwanda's colonial administration, civil war, genocidal divisions, bitter class system, interfering neighbours, ineffectual United Nations and indifferent global powers cannot be told, let alone explained, in a movie that's less than two hours long.

Instead, Rwandan history is summarised in the opening credits:

" Rwanda is a small country in Africa.

For centuries its 10 million citizens viewed themselves as one people.

In 1916, Belgium colonized Rwanda, introducing a system of identity cards separating the majority Hutus from the minority Tutsis.

The Tutsis were given preference in education, jobs and power.

In 1959, when Rwanda became independent, the Hutus rebelled and took over the government, exiling and killing Tutsis.

In 1990 a Tutsi-led multi-ethnic rebel force invaded from Uganda.

French troops intervened.

The invasion ended when both sides signed a peace treaty in 1993, a treaty the UN was sent to protect."

Almost every noun and verb in italics can be disputed (via Wikipedia).

Rwanda, together with Burundi and parts of Uganda, was a feudal kingdom for a couple of centuries, controlled by the ruling class of Tutsis, who had the same ethnic background as the realm's Hutu serfs and Taw pygmies.

During the 1880s carve-up of uncolonised parts of Africa, Rwanda was allocated to Germany; it was grabbed by Belgium during WW1 and became a League/UN mandate. Both sets of colonists maintained the Tutsi-dominated class system, but Belgium switched to supporting the majority Hutus prior to independence in 1962, when Burundi was separated out. Inter-class warfare lasted from the 1950s until the 90s.

Consequently, the Canadian general's increasing despair, and clinical depression arising from his impotent tour of UN duty, can be attributed to everyone's failure to understand that Rwanda was a feudal society on a par with many others (from Fiji and Iran to Nepal and Cambodia, the UK and Liberia to Haiti and Latin America) in which a self-appointed social elite ran things for their own benefit, as the Tutsis still do in Rwanda. All concerned in the 1990s blithely blamed "Hutu extremists" without wondering what had driven them to such bloodthirsty extremes.

The C$11-million docudrama primarily targeted TV and cable audiences in Canada, where the politically aroused lieutenant-general became a popular figure, best-seller and senator: Romeo Dallaire (played by lookalike Roy Dupuis). His naivety and the developed world's mendacity are well depicted and Rwanda's scenery is presented picturesquely, but this movie is a pitifully inadequate glimpse at a socio-political mess the Belgians and the UN stumbled into and out of.

TRON

The Disney studios made animation a global art form, and can also be credited with creating the first (1982) movie based on computer-generated images, TRON. The man credited with its success was writer-director Steven Lisberger, who hawked his ideas around Hollywood and finally found acceptance at Disney.

He co-produced the movie, investing his earnings from Animalympics (1980), and presumably earned a decent living subsequently from the Tron franchise in the form of its arcade games and other spin-offs. Because his only other films were Hot Pursuit (1987), an RKO action-comedy starring John Cusack and a young Ben Stiller, and Slipstream (1989), a low-budget UK scifi thriller starring Bob Peck (supported by Mark Hamill and Bill Paxton). Disney re-employed him (only as a producer, for the use of his "characters") for its long-awaited sequel, Tron: Legacy. Released in 2010, it also brought back the cult film's original stars, Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner.

Bridges, with his signature cocky grin, played Flynn, the master programmer "User" transformed into Clu, a character dropped inside his former company's master control system by its evil boss. He pals up with Tron, a heroic security programme who's User is his human equivalent, a security boffin (Boxleitner) worried about the company's megalomaniac senior executive (David Warner) whose voice reappears in the computer world as commander Sark and his Master Control Program (MCP).

A female boffin (Cindy Morgan, who only worked in TV later) also has a computer double, as does an elderly scientific character, and a third short-lived hero rides through the computer's linear systems with the valiant defenders of computer freedom. Their memories are stored in powerful Frisbee-like discs, and one of their fight-to-the-death games is a stylised version of jai alai (indicating how the whole project was inspired by the mid-70s craze for Atari's Pong - ping-pong - computer game).

Amazingly, despite occasional patches of hammy dialogue and action a la early Star Treks, the movie is still an attractive attempt at blending live action and CGI. It doesn't feel three decades old, and it will be interesting to see how timeless the first Star Wars movie feels by comparison.

Ice blues

Former US child actor Chad Allen, an out gay, had no worries about taking the lead role in the filmed adaptations made for cable TV of the Donald Strachey mysteries, featuring "America's first gay detective". Two of them appeared in 2008, On the Other Hand, Death and Ice Blues, following in the successful screen-steps of Shock to the System (2006) and Third Man Out (2005).

The novels' originality lay in the matter-of-factual presentation of Strachey as an Albany private detective who happens to be gay, and in a lifetime partnership with an assistant to a female New York senator. They were written by an American, Richard Lipez, using the pen name Richard Stevenson, starting with the not-yet-filmed Death Trick, published in 1981 prior to Lipez coming out (with the father-of-two getting divorced in 1989). Ten other books followed, and Lipez became a gay activist in an open relationship with a sculptor.

Newfoundland-born Sebastian Spence has played Strachey's partner in all four films, and the latest was filmed in his home city of Vancouver. All four have been directed by Canada-born Ron Oliver, whose IMDb entry notes that his gay marriage of 2000 ended in divorce after three years. Plots of the novels have been similarly out. In Third Man Out, a notorious outer of gays received death threats, in Shock to the System Strachey solved the murder of a student while the screenplay examined social attitudes and gay conversion; the third film in the series involved an older lesbian couple.

Ice Blues, less focused on homosexuality, sees Strachey investigating whys and wherefores in the funding of one of his lover's favourite charity organisations for the city's youth. The short (80-minute) screenplay includes a runaway girl, a drug dealer making porn movies, a family's corrupt law firm, a vanished mother and murdered son, millions in bearer bonds, a romantic policeman, an English black thug and height-challenged Strachey's even shorter ethnic-Chinese sidekick.

By the time the plot reaches its denouements, after mediocre fisticuffs, and the detective and his slightly fey and whimsical partner have kissed a few times, it has become a gay-accented version of a B movie. Competently acted, professionally produced, almost totally forgettable.

Brilliantlove

"They don't make British soft porn movies like they used to", a great-uncle might utter after watching Brilliantlove. "Nowadays youngsters have to include a real story, good actors with attractive bodies and some jolly nice sets, location work and lighting. Still don't get to see enough action, of course".

Outside the UK, the low-budget second feature from Ashley Horner (R, above) was called The Orgasm Diaries, a truer indicator of the slim plot written by Sean Conway, an even less-experienced short-film writer-director. It's primarily a series of sexual acts and full-frontal exposures performed in north-east England by horny young Manchester, a photographer, and his passionate girlfriend, Noon, who's a taxidermist.

She keeps dead creatures in her father's refrigerator, and welcomes the birds a nomadic cat lays in tribute at the roll-up door of their live-in garage. Randy Manchester tends to get inebriated, which is when he cavorts through a field of flowers and tells a tape recorder to tell Noon that he wants her every sexy thought recorded for his pleasure. He's already recording her sexual motions and gasps on his small camera, and these photos end up in the eager hands of an art dealer who transforms Manchester into a well-paid provider of fancy gallery porno.

The lead actors were called on to perform or simulate masturbation, urination, ejaculation and the usual non-visibly penetratory coitus. To their credit, Liam Browne (L, above, with one previous TV acting role) and complete newcomer Nancy Trotter Landry are believable as lovers. She has a future as a Cherie Blair lookalike. The ending of their breakthrough movie experience is far less convincing, a make-believe melodrama in which Manchester doesn't succeed in accidentally killing himself with a plastic bag during a candlelit masturbation scene.

"My only surprise was the lack of an end-credit warning note about the plastic bag technique", my great-uncle might have mused. "They did note that no animals were injured, so the dead birds must have been simulated too."

Let me in

Re-makes of successful films rarely recreate the originals' freshness, distinctive mood and cinematic quality - three key factors accounting for its original success. One recent attempt was Let Me In, the 2010 English-language version of the acclaimed 2008 Swedish vampire movie, Let the Right One In.

The haste with which it was re-made by Matt Cloverfield Reeves suggests that Swedish film industry insiders knew that the original story could play well in the USA if it wasn't screened with subtitles. Fortunately, they decided not to tout a dubbed version.

The Swedish movie was based on a novel and screenplay by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who worked with Reeves on the American adaptation (to which two other Americans contributed). The original movie was directed by Tomas Alfredson, who won several awards for it; he was not involved with or happy about the US re-make. It was co-produced by long-established British horror production company, Hammer Films (now Dutch-owned and back in business after a two-decade hiatus).

The new version kept the basic story, set in the 1980s in a snowy environment: a bullied 12-year-old boy forms a close friendship with a new neighbour of the same age. She feels no cold, lives with an older guardian, turns out to be a truly bloodthirsty killing machine, helps the boy annihilate his school tormentors, and rides off with him in a train into a vampire's world of essential sunsets.

In America, a completely new character is introduced, a detective (Elias Koteas) investigating a supposed Satanic cult. Possibly seeking to add another known face to the US film's marketing strength, the role of the girl's "guardian" is expanded to show more of Richard Jenkins. To accommodate them, details of the original film's neighbouring victims were trimmed, while a scary scene with cats was completely cut out.

Other differences in the US version are matters of style: the Swedish movie had a slower pace, an eerie quality, and its young actors seemed more spectral, their snow-clad setting more sombre and alarming. The English-speaking pre-teens are presented less ominously, most effectively by Kodi Smit-McPhee, an Australian boy who'd shone in The Road.

The evil side of the girl's character is depicted by some strikingly horrific special effects, but Chloe (a tomboy delight in Kick-Ass) Moretz has a tougher acting challenge. She is possibly too pretty to be seen as a credible Lolita and lifetime physical partner for an older man, even when the screenplay shows us that she had never aged.

This above-average (for the USA) vampire/horror movie doesn't match the cinematic qualities of the Swedish original.

Blue valentine

In 2006, Derek Cianfrance won the Chrysler Film Project award of a million US dollars to make his screenplay, Blue Valentine. His critically-acclaimed debut feature, Brother Tied had appeared in 1998; since then he'd only made shorts and pop music documentaries. The new movie was completed in 2009, shown at Sundance in 2010 and purchased by the Weinstein Company. After a stand-off with the censors, it was distributed at the end of 2010, earning several award nominations for its director and two lead actors, Michelle Williams (including Best Actress Oscar) and Ryan Gosling.

Primarily because of their performances, the tale of love and marital breakdown is also a financial success, rewarding the actors for taking on executive-producer roles too. Williams deserved her Oscar nomination, for a character who proves to be an almost pitiful victim of her own mistakes. Gosling's role is possibly too pitiful to be totally credible.

The film juxtaposes scenes from their late teenage romance and during the final days of their marriage less than a decade later. Cindy had been in deep love with a jock at school, Dean was a dropout working for a removal company. He fell in love with her at first sight, she quickly grew to enjoy his zany companionship. When she discovered she was pregnant by the jock, caring Dean proposed, and she accepted a way out that would also release her from her squabbling parents.

He tells a workmate that men marry when they feel they've found the best possible person for their life, whereas women marry the most suitable option. The screenplay illustrates how wives learn to rue their choice while men continue to chase a false dream. Dean is happy just to be married to Cindy, to be a father for her daughter, but that's not enough for Cindy. Her ennui and growing irritation, heightened by a chance meeting with her former college lover, cannot be dispelled by Dean's charm and rebuffed attempt at cunnilingus (the scene, only inferred, that roused the censors).

For almost two hours, there are well-edited close-ups and fly-on-the-wall observation of two actors playing finely off each other, possibly ad-libbing at times, making their characters seem very alive and suffering. That's not enough meat for a filling movie meal, more a depressing appetiser.