Dancing dreams

Pina Bausch, a leading German modern dance choreographer, died in 2009, during the completion of a documentary report on her teaching style for young people, Tanztraume (Dancing Dreams).

Then aged 69, she did see the class of more than 30 non-professional teenagers complete their eight-month course of Saturday morning dance classes and perform her "Kontakhof", first staged in 1978, in a German theatre.

An ideal exercise for young beginners, the lightly comic dance revue shows teenagers exploring their own personalities, needs and sensual bodies through a sequence of varying dance styles. The documentary focuses on and follows the learning steps of a handful of youngsters who were likely lead roles in the "graduation" performances.

The true stars are Bausch's two middle-aged dance mistresses, visibly loving their work as Bausch's disciples and the apprentices' dance teachers and life counsellors. Bausch herself, a gaunt poker-faced heavy smoker with an imperial stride and smile, only appears in the rehearsal room occasionally, to assess the project's progress and make casting choices. As with documentaries showcasing similar busy cultural icons (Anna Wintour, YSL, etc), the dedicated assistants, their masters' apostles, are the true cultural heroes.

The students are an interesting bunch, some from first or second-generation Germans (from the former Yugoslavia and its Romany migrants), while other dance-curious youngsters sport gelled hairstyles, male earrings and black faces. Overall, they present an almost incredibly happy image of well-adjusted, ethnically-diverse German urban teens, forming a friendly team in which the only foreign influence is the occasional usage of "international" English and French words for limbs and steps.

Although the youngsters' interviews include moments of grief, shyness and despair, it's primarily a self-effacing record of an aspect of Bausch's work. No more, no less, and therefore disappointing. Although a study of dance shouldn't look so pedestrian, it does clearly illustrate Pausch's belief in using modern dance to liberate a teenager's self-esteem.

Hop

An Easter cinema confection for 2011, Hop was conceived by the team that produced the above-average Despicable Me animated comedy. Blending live action and animated figures, Hop is a below-average, flimsy tale of the Easter Bunny heir apparent's desire to get out of the family business.

He (sporting Russell Brand's irritatingly self-pitying voice) has set his mind on being a drummer in Hollywood, where he escapes to and accidentally lands up the life of a layabout human house-sitting in Beverly Hills. He's played by James Marsden, a sweetly comic Prince Charming in his support role for Amy Adams in Enchanted. Now in his late 30s, the actor looks too facially ravaged to portray an irresponsible, cute dropout who ends up running the Easter Bunny empire (an underground candy factory with a workforce of Easter Chicks on, of course, Easter Island).

With technically competent CGI work and likable cartoon characters, the movie might appeal to very young viewers. They were transported to it in box-office-topping numbers for two weeks in the USA, and their parents may still be wondering why the Easter Bunny was English, as was his fretful father (Hugh Laurie). The jealous chief chick flatters and fumes with a Mexican accent (Hank Azaria's voice going south of the border again a la Birdcage, muy macho this time).

In 1988, Who Framed Roger Rabbit created a high bar for comedies putting actors and cartoon characters on the same sets. Hop's producers should have at least tried to reach the same heights of narrative development and clever characterisations. Sadly, the even older generation of Disney family movies appear to have had a stronger and more crippling influence on the storyboard. Its lead pair of writers (Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio) had adapted Dr Seuss's Horton Hears A Who! and Sergio Pablos's Despicable Me successfully, but this original effort fails to shine on any level.

Sammy's adventures

Belgian producer-director Ben Stassen specialises in making movies for IMAX and 3D screens. A few shorts led to his first feature-length animation, the little-seen Fly Me To the Moon 3D (2008), which was followed in 2010 by Sammy's Adventures: The Secret Passage, whose English-language version was released in the UK in 2011 with new British voices. It hasn't gained American distribution despite also being given new voices for that market (including Melanie Griffith and Ed Begley Jr).

Sammy, a green turtle (Dominic Cooper) is born, meets and accidentally rescues the love of his life (Gemma Arterton), meets and accidentally loses a hyper-talkative life-long friend hatched on the same day, and travels the world encountering all manner of evil and foolish man-made disasters. As a 50-year-old grandfather, Sammy is a wise old turtle (John Hurt) teaching his next generation to put its best flipper forwards.

Presumably designed to be acceptable eco-entertainment for school parties in the USA, the agents and vessels of human wrong-doing sport English-language names (signposting oil spills, plastic flotsam, whalers, sewage). By contrast, the unpolluted oceans provide gloriously coloured images of marine paradises, decked with dazzling coral and tropical fish.

Sammy pals up with various fauna on his way to the end of the eco-fable, which is a bland statement that humans will have to do more to help turtles survive. The kindergarten style of the screenplay is highlighted by the frequent fading to black between episodes illustrating this or that aspect of mankind's ecological sins. This is a hi-tech 3D slide show.

The lack of a driving narrative flow and strong characterisations is excusable if the movie is viewed simply as a meaningfully pretty lesson for young children. Its 3D setpieces are enjoyable conceits even in 2D, and the CGI craftsmanship is admirable in the animators' usual testing areas of water and shadow effects and movements.

However, inevitable comparison with Pixar's Finding Nemo is not so favourable for Stassen's team's dramatic skills. There was just one noticeable improvement, to my ears: the non-presence of the whining voice of klutzy Albert Brooks as the tedious voice of Nemo's father.

Incendies

Although Oscar voters are less predictably schmaltzy than they used to be, they still spurn ugly reality when choosing Best Foreign Language Films. In 2011, they chose tediously well-intentioned In a Better World (set in Africa, from Denmark) rather than the French-Canadian entry, Incendies (Scorched).

Denis Villeneuve's direction and adaptation of the play by Lebanese-Canadian Wajdi Mouawad opens out what must have been an histrionic tale of a Middle Eastern woman immigrant in Quebec. Her notarised last wishes ask her grown-up twin children to visit the land of their birth, where they will meet a brother they didn't know about and learn about their unknown father.

The notary, whom the mother had worked for as a secretary, has promised to aid their searches and delivery of the mother's letters. The three travel to an unnamed Middle East country, the daughter first, learning about their mother's life and their homeland's bitter history. Flashbacks illustrate the ordeals that challenged the woman's belief in love, religion and humanity.

An audience doesn't need to know that the mother was a Maronite Christian, her lover a Muslim, and their country (Lebanon) had been devastated by decades of religious conflict, civil war and invasions. The succession of tragedies and horrors are made to feel universal by well-paced direction and editing, with quiet spells showcasing fine cinematography of harsh scrub-land and bombed urban environments (on location in Jordan). Throughout, no musical soundtrack detracts from the attention focused on the excellent cast's faces.

The melodramatic sting in the tale leaves loose psychological strands waving wildly in the viewer's imagination. They may have been topics not enough Oscar voters wanted to contemplate or honour with a top award.

Beaver

As a director and actress, former child star Jodie Foster works well with stories about children. She's also been a surprisingly strong counter-balance to aggressive male screen figures, and The Beaver may have seemed an interesting challenge to her.

A toy company chief executive (Mel Gibson), sinking further into depression, is eventually rejected by his wife (Foster) and elder son (Anton Yelchin). After failed suicide attempts, he puts himself into the care of a domineering glove puppet reject (the title role beaver). It takes control of his left arm and his voice, which now proclaims dangerously cute rough love of him in the tones of Michael Caine.

His infant son is enchanted, his wife is won over, but the son remains aloof. So did I. The son's a class genius, completing papers for fellow students for a fee. A top-graded girl (Jennifer Lawrence) needs a speech, and she'll pay up to a thousand dollars for it, believe it or not. I didn't.

She had a brother who ODed, and she casts aside her expensive honeyed phrases to tell her class about everyone simply needing love, which inspires her speech-writing lover to rush and embrace a father who'd cut off his left arm to free himself from the puppet. That's the plot and it's hard to imagine why Foster thought she could fashion such a pig's ear into cinematic silk.

Harvey and Walter Mitty meet Lars and evil blood-thirsty puppet stereotypes (Chucky, Puppet Master, Gremlins and Child's Play franchises) on the way to an Ordinary Family? Writer Kyle Killen, a new hack on the Hollywood block, sold his concept to Foster and her producers. They lost most of their $20-30 million investment; at least Gibson got a chance to show that he's a charismatic middle-aged actor who's willing to look and act his age.

Midnight in Paris

Writer-director Woody Allen's biggest box-office success is his latest (2011) European confection, Midnight in Paris. The English title gave it a romcom tilt, but the French title may have better suited Allen's intentions (and customary egocentric genre), Monsieur Le Souris (Mr Mouse).

Once again facing up to reality, the veteran American auteur employs a substitute for himself in the leading role of a weak-willed questioning American intellectual. This time, it's Owen Wilson, who fits the bill very well, and he's a Hollywood screenwriter and wannabe novelist visiting Paris with his fiancee (Rachel McAdams) and her parents.

As always, guest stars flock to Allen's sets because he does give them the chance to have a little fun for a good cause, which is Allen's special aura. The French have long adored, and his long opening sequence of a host of picture-postcards shots of Paris, from the air, by day, in the rain, by night, illustrates his love of the French capital and its romantic and artistic history.

Wilson starts his visit in 2010, meeting an arrogant American academic (Michael Sheen) showing off to a Parisian museum guide (Carla Bruni, aka Mme Sarkozy). Rejecting his US-centric fiancee's worldview, fretting about his novel, tipsy and wandering Wilson is whisked away, after the peals of midnight, by a vintage Peugeot driven by F.Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (more Brits, this time Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill). Transported back to the 1920s, he meets practically tout le monde, from Cole Porter to Bunuel to TS Eliot and Picasso.

After further historical-name-dropping scenes, a movie-goer is doubly challenged when the significance of the painters, writers and personalities is not clearly spelled out at the same time was the audience is trying to recall who is who among the fast-tracked parade of international up-and-coming stars of stage and screen. Only Kathy Bates (as Gertrude Stein) and Marion Cotillard (as one of Picasso's mistresses) shone in this latest Allen version of cinematic charades.

At one stage, when Bates/Stein was also talking in French and Spanish, the game was nearly risible. I don't know of the actor who played Hemingway dourly, and Adrian Brody's Dali failed to register at all. When Wilson and Cotillard found themselves horse-and carriaged back to the 19th Century Belle Epoque, meeting its great painters (including an inevitably small cameo for Toulouse-Lautrec) at Maxim's restaurant, the game ended for me.

Maybe the high box-office takings were accounted for by returnees eager to catch all the names that were dropped, all the talents that were employed on the screen. They possibly helped some viewers to overlook the fact that Allen had given Wilson woefully unwitty and non-cerebral dialogue, while getting him to walk, talk and comment off-screen a la the older Allen who cineastes worshipped for good brain-tickled reasons. This younger Allen is a boring mouse, and there may be a good reason: Allen wanted all the Parisian residents of the past to declaim their aesthetic ideals and ambitions with an historical passion no 21st-Century Hollywood hack (Wilson's screen character) would dare to pen. Or else Allen doesn't want to create a version f himself that's both younger and just as clever.

3 idiots

Bollywood's audiences clearly demand much more than just their money's worth: in addition to frantic action, sentimental romances, family values, epic song-and-dance routines, luscious colour schemes and superstar actors, they expect long running times. Which are really necessary to accommodate all the aforesaid prerequisites. Bollywood certainly fulfilled their needs with 3 Idiots in 2009, and its audiences rewarded the comic caper with record box office receipts, at more than US$75 million gross (ten times its production budget).

It's not just a good buddy movie, about three room-mates at a top engineering college. It's also a road movie and a rom-com, in which the irreverent lead character (superstar Aamir Lagaan Khan) hits it off with a soignee medical intern (Kareena Kapoor) whose frizzy-haired arrogant father is the college's director (Boman Irani). And it's a nerd saga, with a materialist college rival discovering the true meanings of science and success when he tracks down his nemesis a decade after college.

The six grandiose quick-cut musical set-pieces are above-average smile-inducing sequences of movie quotations from Hollywood, Bollywood and classic romances. The aerial location work in Simla and Ladakh provides wide-screen delight, and the ageing lead actors convey youthful elan and silliness with the winking stylishness of vintage Cliff Richard movies.

Technically, however, the movie is light years ahead of Cliff and Carry On comparisons, as are the plotting and dialogue. Credits go to young story creator and editor-director Rajkumar Hirani and veteran screenplaywright-producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra, who'd previously won many awards and big profits for their two Munna Bhai comedies (starring Sanjay Dutt).

At almost three hours, the movie is never boring, with excellent subtitling that enables non-Hindis to appreciate the local comic touches, even the wordplay in a hi-falutin Hindu speech delivered by a Pondicherry-educated ex-Ugandan Indian. It's also cheering to see a film in which India is presented so positively as an aspiring society overcoming racial, religious, gender and caste issues, its everyday language decked with English-language expressions and liberal thoughts.

There's some astonishing coy homo-erotic campness, including chorus-lines of engineering students in non-sexy underpants whose rears are lowered, animated sperm, running jokes featuring farts, and levels of tear-wrenching super-strength schmaltz no old-style Hollywood mogul would have ever dared to produce in so many bucketfuls in so many sub-plots.

This is the sort of musical comedy that Hollywood used to make, on a much smaller and less cerebral scale, set in West Coast campuses and beach resorts. No one's still making such Grease or Xanadu clones in the USA, except Disney for the pre-teen market; the adult version has been outsourced to India, where it's done very well.

Bridesmaids

Kristen Wiig, a five-year SNL regular, teamed up with fellow LA comedy team ("Groundlings") member Annie Mumolo to write a slick chick-flick comedy, Bridesmaids. Wiig featured in Paul and Judd Apatow's Knocked Up, and Apatow helped produce her first self-starring screen effort, alongside Barry Mendel, another successful backer of above-average comedies (from Wes Anderson, Joss Whedon) and weightier dramas (Speilberg, Shyamalan). The direction was handed to movie fresher Paul Feig, a TV veteran (The Office, Arrested Development, Nurse Jackie). They all knew exactly what they were doing: tweaking a formula.

Wiig goes where many TV comics have gone before: into the safe genre of the multi-buddy movie, where a variety of stereotypical characters indulge in stereotypical comic set-pieces. This time, Wiig's group is a quintet of maids of honourable intentions arranging their mutual friend's marital rites.

Envelopes were pushed wickedly, enabling ladies who lunch to chatter about licking male genitals, coping with sons' masturbatory excesses, and shitting on sidewalks in wedding dresses. Happily, such gross scenes are offset by some above-par wit and farcical set-pieces and occasional spots of wryly-written female bonding.

Maya Rudolph (ten-year SNL regular), as the bride-to-be, plays a mature character of colour balancing Wiig's egocentric and dizzy blonde Fey-like late-30s loser. Aussie Rose (Damages) Byrne scintillates as a socially aggressive rich bitch (partnering Wiig marvelously in a doubles tennis match and an extended game of microphone one-up-manship). Wendy McLendon-Covey (another Groundlings member, for nine years) was given some juicily raunchy dialogue as a frustrated suburban mom. Ellie Kemper (from US TV's Office) got the weakest role as a tiny cloistered soul while naturally large Melissa McCarthy has multiple scenery-chewing moments as a fearsomely friendly tomboy who loves dogs and an air marshal (distastefully so, not amusingly, in a bizarre end-credits insert of a love feast including ham slices on his nipples).

Irish comic actor Chris O'Dowd (UK TV's The IT Crowd) provides the movie's major male love interest, as a highway patrol officer, for Wiig's former cakeshop-owner; the other man in her life is a selfish sex interest, nicely self-ridiculed by Greg Tuculescu. There are also some bijou comic roles, an audience-friendly bonus in inventive comedy writing: a twitchy child with a warped mind, obnoxious sibling roommates (Matt Lucas and Rebel Wilson), jewelry customers.

As a distaff version of the standard parade of male dirty talk for teenage audiences, Bridesmaids is good entertainment. Not good enough for its inevitable sequel, but neither was Hangover.

Monga

A-

Good-looking tapestry of gang motifs.

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Every country with a film industry makes movies about gangs of youths, to satisfy ready-made audiences eager to buy tickets for big-screen battles starring their proxy selves. Taiwan's 2010 successful version of the genre, set in the mid-1980s, was Monga.

Named for an old rough and raunchy Taipei district, the movie shows locale-specific scenes of young male bonding, homoerotic friendship, street battles and adult gang reality. Five stereotypical young men have fun and games and fights, following character outlines that highlight comic cuteness or simple-mindedness, dramatic leadership qualities and perfectly-posed outsider stares.

Director Doze Taipei 24H Niu (who also plays a mainland gangster) and the excellent cinematographer (Taiwan-resident Jake Pollock, Yang Yang and Pinoy Sunday) wove a good-looking tapestry of gang motifs. The lead actors preen, puff their cigarettes, sport their pecs and make gangsterdom look an adorable lifestyle, until it turns, as film industry morality demands, nasty.

Contagion

When a new disease from China suddenly went really viral in the Special Administrative Region (SAR) of Hong Kong in 2003, the local government struggled vainly to get the global medical authorities to avoid naming it as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). Within a few years, bowing to inevitability, the SAR Government allowed Steven Soderbergh to do location filming for his mainstream docudrama about a similar fast-moving killer epidemic, Contagion (2011).

It shows that getting closer than ten feet to anyone, particularly shaking hands with a chef in Macau, can be lethal unless you're immune to or inoculated against an air-borne disease. The Everyman character represented blandly by lead actor Matt Damon is immune, which deprives the film's audience of any chance to care whether he lives or dies. Instead, it's more fun to note how the germ of a movie idea was mutated into a Hollywood product.

Scott Z.Burns, who wrote the screenplay, has also worked with Soderbergh on the remake of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2012) and the screen adaptation of the bio-doc The Informant! (2009). The latter starred Matt Damon, a frequent collaborator with Soderbergh. Damon and Burns knew each other too, from Burns' co-writing of the adaptation of The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). Damon contacted former co-star Jude Law (The Talented Mr Ripley) and other star names were lined up for life-or-death roles (Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Jennifer Ehle, and Elliott Gould survive; Kate Winslet and Gwyneth Paltrow die).

As the Oceans franchise showed, Soderbergh appears to create a happy-go-lucky mood on his sets, and such a working environment must be akin to R&R for the acting trade. Inevitably in a quilted disaster saga, characters are quick sketches with cliched words and expressions. Jude Law has the only juicy role, as the only truly despicable person in a world of noble disease control specialists. He sports awry teeth and a nagging Oz accent as a paranoid self-righteous anti-Establishment blogger who believes in, and profits from, a homeopathic cure (and it may be tempting for Wikileak's Julian Assange to consider a libel suit).

His Messianic impact is credible, unlike the Chinese colleague (played by a Singaporean actor) of researcher Cotillard who abducts her to obtain an advance order of inoculations for his home-village survivors. There's a bossy budget-conscious boss lady at FEMA, but no other American character comes close to nastiness, other than hundreds of extras playing panicky rioting plebs who get tired of queuing for emergency food supplies or jabs.

The movie's initially fast-paced, and a credit to its editing team and Soderbergh's camerawork, with each set of scenes marked by a numbered "Day". However, a film that starts with "Day 2" made this viewer fret that the projectionist (or distant digital finger) had lost "Day 1". It appears at the very end, to show how the disease started, but by then the sequence of field reports from Hong Kong, Macau and various American cities had slowed down so much that the scenario was creaking.

The procedural CSI-style disaster-thriller had become an increasingly tedious, dare one say lifeless, docudrama that had more documentation (and medical mumbo-jumbo) than drama. Several stars frothed at the mouth fetchingly (probably courtesy of Alka Seltzer, which deserved an end-credit), but the whole parade turned into a muddled and mealy-mouthed condemnation of human weaknesses.

Notebook on cities and clothes

Egocentric Dutch director Wim (My American Friend) Wenders attempted the impossible with Notebook on Cities and Clothes: he had been commissioned by the director of the Pompidou Centre to look at the fashion industry through a 1988 documentary centred on the working style of Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto, a long-haired man in black clothes constantly.

Initially, Wenders focused on his own thoughts about cities, life and identity in the digital age. That provided a rationale for including camcorder replays of Yamamoto interview comments on materials, inspirations and other fashion pointers.

When the designer speaks Japanese, subtitle translations convey the words of his thoughts clearly even if the thoughts are vague. Unfortunately, most of the time Yamamoto murmurs in the English language, hesitantly as well as vaguely. It's hard, and unrewarding, to try and follow his chugging trains of thought.

Wenders' cameramen watch Yamamoto in his workhop, snipping and arranging cloth. Truly inscrutable and seemingly shy, the designer is not an exciting documentary subject to observe or listen to. So Wenders takes him to a billiards hall to ask some questions in a livelier and slightly more colourful setting than in Yamamoto's monochromatic environment.

[Interestingly, Yamamoto subsequently developed a second career as a movie costume designer, including work on four productions for the prolific actor-director Takeshi Kitano between 2000 and 2005.]

[Wenders, also a workaholic, has directed a further 26 titles so far, 15 of which were full-length features or documentaries. He's garnered nominations for an Oscar and a BAFTA (for Ry Cooder's scintillating 1998 documentary Buena Vista Social Club), having already won a BAFTA for Paris, Texas in 1984.]

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, published in 1847, has been adapted for the screen in several languages umpteen times; the latest UK version (2011) looks and sounds good enough to explain why such a melodramatic, Gothic and proto-feminist love story should have retained popular appeal for so long.

Partly financed by BBC Films, the production benefits from shrewd choices for its director and leading roles. Fresh from his multi-award-winning 2009 debut feature as a writer-director (docudrama Sin Nombre), the young US director, Cary Fukunaga (Japanese-Swedish parentage), approached the Eng-Lit period-piece with the outsider's eye (in a similar eye-opening fashion as Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility).

Italian Oscar winner (Atonement) and nominee (Pride and Prejudice) Dario Marianelli, in danger of being type-cast as the go-to Masterpiece Theatre composer, wrote the finely-muted background music. Prolific young Irish-British playwright Moira Buffini, who'd adapted Tamara Drewe for Stephen Frears the previous year, transformed Bronte's romance for the screen. She hadn't tied up Bronte's many loose ends, which is proper, but leaves various abrupt events far from fully explained, such as the mad wife's attack on her unidentified brother, Jane's cousins, and two French-speakers' fate.

Irish-German Brit actor Michael (Hunger, Fish Tank, X-Men) Fassbender was an obvious choice for imperious Rochester, Polish-Australian Mia (Alice in Wonderland, In Treatment, The Kids are All Right) Wasikowska a wise one for the young governess with heart, soul and many opinions. The key supporting cameos were played well enough by Jamie Bell, as Jane's pious suitor, and Judi Dench as Rochester's caring housekeeper.

Fassbender had several tough shoes to fill (Orson Welles, William Hurt and Timothy Dalton) and did so creditably, with moments of facial expressiveness a la Olivier and Day-Lewis at their best. Wasikowska is an ideal plain Jane of the 19th century, displaying the charming moral qualities and repressed teenage ambitions that were way ahead of her time and gender role. The cast's northern English accents might distress Lancastrians, but to an outsider they come across as acceptable middle-class regional characters.

This Jane gazes wistfully at her claustrophobic cloudy landscape with an intensity channeling a new Jodie Foster. The production embedded her convincingly in well-detailed production and costume designs, often illuminated strikingly by candles, with the surrounding starkness left deliberately silent and menacing. Fukunaga was lucky to be given this gem for his sophomore performance, and he rewarded his producers' trust.