Gnomeo & Juliet

Animated movies now have such high production standards to live up to that, unlike other major movie genres, their success depends critically on the depth, wit and overall audience appeal of their screenplay. They cannot rely simply on star voices, glitzy locations or 3D effects. Inevitably, there will be therefore be more ransacking of the classics, as with Gnomeo & Juliet, an attractively reworked version of Shakespeare's play.

This time, the Capulets and Montagues are clans of red and blue garden gnomes, backed up by various other garden figurines, in neighbouring semi-detached English houses. Lord Redbrick (voiced by Michael Caine) is over-protective of independent-minded Juliet (Emily Blunt); Lady Blueberry (Maggie Smith) is the vengeful mother of bold Gnomeo (James McAvoy).

The production was headed by the partnership of Elton John (recycling some of his songs and Bernie Taupin's lyrics playfully) and David Furnish. The lively original score incorporating themes from many other John hits was composed by James Newton Howard. Director Kelly Asbury had previously made Shrek 2 and Spirit: Stallion, and the cast of voices includes many unexpected stars (from Lady Gaga to Hulk Hogan, Dolly Parton to Keith Statham, Ozzy Osborne and Matt Lucas) for the unusually ambitious non-US Disney (Touchstone) package, crafted by Toronto's Starz Animation (makers of 9), flourishing their CG skills on leaves, smoke, water, reflections and, uniquely, stone/cement surfaces.

Maybe there are just a few dozen too many cute word plays with Shakespearean and/or garden furnishing origins, and for sure the characters are too cute for comfort. Yet the movie achieves the impossible mission of making garden gnomes look and sound likeably cute. There's a host of visual comedy from plastic flamingos, lawn-mowers, a mute and loyal sniffer mushroom and a statue of Shakespeare (Patrick Stewart). The whole movie is colourfully wild and wacky, albeit going nowhere near the magical reality qualities of a Burton or Gilliam fantasy.

In a better world

The Danish film industry chose wisely when it picked its entry for the 2011 Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar. In a Better World, directed magisterially by Susanne Bier, combines various elements from past award-winners: the juxta-positioning of European and African story lines, schoolboy alliances, bullying, marital stress and, as the original and much more informative title announced, revenge (Haevnen).

Its writer, Anders Thomas Jensen, provided the screenplay that won both the Oscar and Golden Globe for foreign film in 2011; it was his fourth collaboration with Bier. For its first hour, it was a visually stunning, emotionally gripping film tapestry, weaving its various story lines well.

Then, an over-loud over-emotive ecumenical chorale wailed, and there was one too many beautifully composed cinematographic postcard of African landscapes contrasted with similarly ravishing scenes from the Danish countryside. For the second hour, the movie's all-conquering power was lacking, its credibility sapped, every scene too craftily contrived.

The core story is that of two schoolboys, one a buck-toothed sweet-natured bullied son of a separated couple. His Swedish father is the director of a field hospital in Africa, probably Sudan, his Danish mother also a medical professional. A new boy at school, fiercely resentful of his mother's death from cancer, befriends the "rat-boy" and uses him as a means of revenge on the world and his distant businessman father.

In Africa, the doctor is obliged to provide treatment for a one-eyed warlord who (conveniently for the movie's morals) places bets on the sex of pregnant women's babies, and slices them open to find out the answer. Back in Denmark, visiting his two young sons, the doctor encounters xenophobic adult bullying from another dramatically convenient villainous character. On both continents, his high-minded decency is tested, and in Denmark he tries to teach the three boys the virtue of turning one's cheek and ignoring moronic behaviour. The alienated child prefers the idea of revenge, in words against his father and with knives and bombs against bullies.

Meanwhile, the mother unknowingly seeks some justice for her unfaithful husband, the widower cannot establish a relationship with his motherless son, and that angry boy sits often and ominously on the rooftop of a tall silo. All the characters end up happily, as they are supposed to in a better world, and the screenplay ignores the future lives of the Africans and the school bully. The movie is an above-average TV drama; moralistic soap operatics that look good and sound too pat, too formulaic to be convincing images of forgivable revenges.

Kaboom

Indie-gay Japanese-American Gregg Araki loves to make controversial movies featuring sexy teenage bodies. Luckily, he also knows how to choose a cast of competent as well as attractive actors. Their efforts for his eleventh and latest (2010) romp, a comic fantasy entitled Kaboom, helped to earn him the Cannes film festival's first-ever Queer Palm.

"The Queer Palm will recognize one film for its contribution to lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender issues.

Cannes, whose 63^rd edition runs for 10 days in a town along the French Riviera starting May 12, was the largest European film festival to lack a gay prize. The Berlin Film Festival's annual Teddy Award first debuted in 1987, while the Queer Lion has been recognizing gay-themed films screened at the Venice Film Festival since 2007."

To keep such awards in perspective, it should also be noted that Cannes has presented a Palme D'Or counterpart, the Palm Dog (for the best canine performance) since 2001, with Boss from Tamara Drewe winning in 2010.

Araki wrote all but one of his movie's screenplays, and has not yet replicated the critical success of his ninth feature, Mysterious Skin. That 2004 film won awards galore, in large part due to Joseph Gordon-Levitt's co-starring performance. The child actor and former TV sitcom star (3rd Rock from the Sun) played a sexually and psychologically confused character well.

Araki may have hoped that Kaboom's male lead would provide similar magic and luck, casting another experienced child actor and TV regular (Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Heroes, Terminator), Thomas Dekker, as sexually malleable "Smith". With his trimmed stubble, glittering blue eyes and schoolboyish carnal charm, he could be viewed physically and figuratively as a young (18-year-old) messiah in a tale of college youth discovering each other's sexual organs.

Dekker re-hired his favourite actor, very-mixed-blood James Duval, to play a spaced-out character actually called Messiah, and imported Roxane Mesquida (Catherine Breillat's favourite actress) to emote as Lorelei, a witch and lustful temptress for Smith's fag-haggy lesbian best friend, mean-eyed sarcastic Stella (Haley Bennett). An English actress, Juno Temple (daughter of director Julien), is "London", a laid-back British student prepared to lay out on Smith and straighten him up.

But Smith still has eager eyes for his dumb jock of a room-mate, Thor (TV actor Chris Zylka, obliged to display all his big muscles and meaty buns), and is net-chatting a real gay character (Brennan Mejia), despite being side-tricked by London into sharing a birthday fuck with Thor's hunky buddy (muscular TV bit-parter Andy Fisher-Price).

All of the actors are visibly over their supposed college age, suggesting that it was tricky to get, or obtain approval to employ, teenage actors for full-dorsal (male) and full-breasted (female) fake orgasms, of which there are various full-face examples for audiences to emulate. There are also some well-photographed older adult bodies in bright-coloured side-plotlets.

The occasionally hilarious (and sometimes intentionally so) screenplay cries out to be treated as a freaky frolic dreamed up between puffs, snorts and sucks. Its ending is beyond a joke though, ensuring that the film achieves the juvenile self-set task of being the first movie to blend soft-porn, horror, scifi, lesbian, gay, youth, Christian and Oedipal themes. The young actors' names will be worth following, but Araki has become an old-fashioned agent provocateur of his so-called New Queer cinema.

Two in the wave

Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut are the focal points of Two in the Wave, "the story of the friendship that changed cinema forever". In French, the 2010 documentary is entitled Deux de la vague, and only a film buff could have made such a Francocentric assertion about a pair of French directors.

Prolific Cahiers de Cinema writer Antoine de Baecque reviews the early collaboration and later fallout of two of his magazine's famed former staff, their key early movies, and their shared leading actor Jean-Pierre Leaud. The screenplay was written and narrated by de Baecque, directed by Emmanuel Laurent.

It is an unforgivably verbose and messy collage that takes almost half-an-hour to provide basic data about the two directors' family backgrounds and cinematic influences. The script, which seems to have set the aimless tone for the whole documentary, jumps around confusingly and purposelessly.

A dead-pan young French actress flips through clippings albums, a shadowy writer (possible de Baecque) looks at his computer, various faces make comments in archived material, and brief clips from some of the directors' movies pop up, rarely illustrating anything narrated in the commentary. That contains far too many irrelevant dates (of meetings) and passing names (producers, other directors) fails to note Truffaut's early death, and lurches into a very incomplete study of Leaud's work and feelings for the two feuding father-figures in his career.

There are frequent moments when a viewer is shown a factual or cinematic gem worth studying in more detail, only to have it trampled in the rush to the next non-consequentiality. So many promising documentary topics await focused attention: Andre Malraux's dominance in the Gaullist cultural machinery, his dismissal (and forced reinstatement) of the Cinematheque director Henri Langlois, ways in which the Nouvelle Vague presaged the May 1968 riots, the persona of Antoine Doinel (the semi-autobiographical boy in Truffaut's debut 400 Blows and a life-long role for Leaud), Marxism in movie-making, the then and now of other Young Turks in French cinema, the risk-taking independent producers.

Other possible topics could or should have been noted en passant, notably the love-hate complex that drives French auteurs to adore parts of Hollywood (from Welles and Hitchcock to Woody Allen) while despising its commercialism and insincerity. The narcissism of the two leading French directors and others, a form of cinematic nationalism and incest, is noted only briefly but uncritically, as is their snobbish intellectualism. Clearly, the subjects were too close to the hearts and archives of the writer and director for them to do justice to the medium or its pair of message maestros.