The people vs. George Lucas

A-

Love-hate docu complexity for Star Wars and its creator.

***********************************************************

Documentary features can be entertaining ways to learn things one didn't know, or even realise one wanted to know. The People vs. George Lucas took 90 minutes to show me that a true force of film fans willingly exhibit a love-hate complexity for Star Wars and its creator.

They, and Alexandre Philippe's interesting film essay, initially appear to be making a lot of fuss about nothing really special. Bit by bit, though, the charges leveled at Lucas add up to a damning indictment of the commercial film industry (and its unstated dumbing-down of movie audiences).

1. Lucas's "special editions" of the initial trilogy re-wrote Hans Solo's character so that he wouldn't be seen cold-bloodily shooting an assassin. The fans' rage isn't directed at hypocritical PC squeamishness by Lucas's Hollywood associates.

2. The introduction of Jar Jar Binks as an unfunny (to the older fans) creature apparently designed for a new generation of kids expecting silly voices and fart jokes.

3. The prequel trilogy's diminution of "The Force" into a genetic disturbance.

4. Lucas's control-freakery and apparent deliberate slights for Star Wars fans.

5. The fundamental commercialism of an entertainment industry that either overpowered Lucas or encouraged him to exploit, preventing him ever making another creative film, instead devoting himself to a Darth Vader-like existence running his Star Wars empire.

The most damning evidence of the sixth charge is the Star Wars Christmas [aka Holiday in Wikipedia, probably for the usual modern pc reason] Special for TV in 1978, which Lucas subsequently attempted to deny and destroy. A quarter of the two-hour disaster reportedly comprises an un-subtitled setpiece of growling for Chewbacca and his newly-introduced family.

Although the documentary tries to present a balanced critique of aspects of Lucas's achievements and failings with Star Wars, the non-cooperation by his empire and Hollywood production associates leaves the field clear for the fervent fans' rants (most of which are fairly comical, including an early Simon Pegg send-up).

Clips from many of the fans' home-filmed parodies, satires, animations and denunciations (one re-working Misery to great effect) provide the heart of the documentary, and confirm its claim that Star Wars inspired a generation of film-goers. Lucas "raped their childhood", some fans assert, self-mockingly, even though his sins provoked a new art form of amateur cinematics.

The professionals do the best job though: an excerpt from South Park's condemnation of the Lucas-Spielberg re-launch (depicted as a two-man rape of Indiana Jones) offers the blackest comic commentary on the whole business.

Mission Impossible 4

A-

It's soon clear why Tom Cruise and his multi-million-dollar production team entrusted the ageing star actor's very valuable franchise to Brad Bird.

***********************************************************

The subtitle of the fourth Mission Impossible would only interest movie geeks seeking a Trivial Pursuit triumph with Ghost Protocol. More geeks and most mainstrean movie buffs will probably remember that it was the first non-animated feature from director Brad Bird (whose Pixar hits included included Ratatouille and, most memorably, The Incredibles, which featured his own unforgettable super-shrieky voice-over for its bossy fashion dominatrix).

It's soon clear why Tom Cruise and his multi-million-dollar production team (including MI3's director JJ Abrams) entrusted the ageing star actor's very valuable franchise to Bird. Their action-adventure vehicle is virtually an animated CGI movie itself, employing a few competent humans to stare, fret, sweat and leap out of the stances stuntmen got them into. At that level of film-making, MI4 is almost as good and definitely less credible than The Incredibles.

Cruise has assembled an able new team. Paula (Deja Vu) Patton joins him for the first time as a gungho lite-black (Obama-style) fighting woman, along with Jeremy (Hurt Locker) Renner as an IMF analyst and new tough buddy role. Simon Pegg, the back-office comic IT boffin in MI3, returns as a field agent, a bumbling Brit smiler counterpointing his US partners' deadly seriousness.

What they are all doing, why and how is little explained. The scenario rushes from one of the setpieces of mega-bucks explosions and car crashes to one of the seconds-counting procedurals in which wires are spliced, magnets and robots teeter, and face masks are manipulated.

There is a stereotypical group of well-cast villains, spies, Russian henchmen and anti-terrorists pirouetted by the screenplay around a calmly mad Swedish nuclear mastermind. Their antics in Moscow are worth the location work around the exploded Kremlin. Similarly, Cruise's gecko-style climbing of Dubai's tallest tower is jolly scenic sensationalism, albeit with an unimpressive sandstorm. India gained a less admirable image for its tourism industry by allowing the team to create a lavish Bollywood ball in which Anil (Slumdog Millionaire) Kapoor had to squander himself as a Lothario billionaire buffoon with supposedly crucial codes to a satellite.

The really crucial plus factor for MI this time is its musical soundtrack. It was hard to imagine any further variations on Lilo Schifrin's mesmerising and ideally tense driving themes being created, let alone the addition of complementary new music which pounds a cineplex's walls and brilliantly underscores the fast-moving action and stunts. Composer Michael Giacchino (who worked on both The Incredibles and Ratatouille for Bird) should be nominated for an Oscar, alongside the sound crew.

(A personal thankyou will go to the first reviewer who explains, with citations from the screenplay, why Ethan Hunt's wife was, and then wasn't, killed and why she - Michele Monaghan - then appears in the movie's very jejune epilogue.)

The epilogue also suggests that Ving Rhames will be returning to the franchise as the MI5 team's boss (replacing the assassinated and uncredited Tom Wilkinson). Maybe Cruise realised that he needs to give himself a bit of female company if his Ethan Hunt is to measure up better beside Bond, Bourne and all the other ageing action stars.

Princess and the frog

A+

Delightful dialogue and rich plotting made this a cartoon adults could admire, a non-stop pageant of appropriate animation conceits.

*************************************************************

When Disney fully merged its animation business with that of Pixar, there were concerns that its distinctive hand-drawn artistry might vanish into an ocean of CGI. The Princess and the Frog was cheering proof that old-fashioned techniques were still in effect in 2009 and still brilliantly effective.

A poor black girl dreams of fulfilling her dead father's goal to open a niterie of fine fare and happy jazz in old New Orleans. Her mother worked for a rich white family, whose happy-go-lucky tomboyish daughter remains her best friend (voiced with glorious self-mocking nouveau riche joie de vivre by Jennifer Cody).

An irresponsible outcast young French prince arrives in the city with his plump put-upon manservant, planning to marry the rich man's spoiled "princess". The voodoo conman Dr Facilier makes pacts with the two men, tricking the prince and turning him into a frog.

He accidentally transforms the black girl into a frog too; together, the lazy male and tomboy female amphibian must defeat the evil Shadows and achieve their dreams. Helped, naturally, by a typically Disneyish crew of bizarre characters - a romantic glowworm in love with the Night Star, a cowardly obese alligator who's a jazz sax maestro, and a cantankerous old voodoo lady (Oprah Winfrey) with a loyal versatile snake.

Delightful dialogue and rich plotting (mostly credited to Disney's experienced writing-directing duo of Ron Clements and John Musker) made this a cartoon adults could admire, and it's a non-stop pageant of appropriate animation conceits. Although the overall drawing style evokes old-style New Yorker magazine sketching, the usual tricks of the Disney trade are displayed in colourful and convincing swirls of smoke, fire, bubbles, water and shadows.

The Broadway-style comedy musical's songs (two nominated for the Oscar) were typical Randy Newman delights, and the animation's socio-political colour-blindness (featuring Disney's first black princess) was admirable, probably made more acceptable in some US states by its "foreign" setting and prince. A sequel, and a further US$100-million investment in hand-drawing would be welcome.

X-men origins: wolverine

A+

It shows, a la Spiderman, that an action-fantasy can dare to have thoughtful conversational pauses.

***********************************************************

Two years after its release date (2009), X-Men Origins: Wolverine looked better than I'd thought it would. The director's name, Gavin Hood, deserved research, as he should have gone on to further glory on the block-buster scene. [*]

Hugh Jackman also gave himself an above-average supporting cast. Liev Schreiber was an ideal equally indestructible elder brother with murderous mutant skills and vicious extendable finger nails. Danny Huston yet again perfectly personified sweet-talking evil intent as the obsessed Dr Hyde of mutant research.

Fellow mutants were cameo roles played competently (including Ryan Reynolds in a breakthrough comic macho performance). Even the female interest, a First Nation Canadian schoolteacher, was well written and characterised (played by Texan Lynn Collins).

The SFX were handsomely explosive: it was clear why Jackman lost his cool when an un-effected print was stolen and widely spread on the internet.

The good and innocent victims were too good to be true, but they always must be in the graphic novella empire of Stan Lee and Marvel DC comic books.

This spin-off from the X-Men franchise did more than fill in Logan/Wolverine's background (originating two centuries earlier according to the comic-book military capers sequence in the brothers-at-war action prologue). It showed, a la Spiderman, that an action-fantasy can dare to have thoughtful conversational pauses.

[* South Africa-born Gavin Hood's career path stumbled. After the former lawyer and actor studied film at the Uni of California, he wrote, directed and took the lead role in the SA-set 1999 award-winning A Reasonable Man (co-starring Nigel Hawthorne). Replacing the sick director of a Polish film on location in South Africa (2001) and the follow-up TV mini-series, he stayed there to write and direct his breakthrough 2005 Best Foreign Film Oscar-winner, Tsotsi, adapted from an Athol Fugard novel. That led to Hollywood giving him Rendition, a 2007 political thriller that flopped. Subsequently, he directed three TV series/dramas while preparing Ender's Game, his adaptation of a Mormon author's sci-fi fantasy, due for release in 2013.]

James and the giant peach

A

Director Henry Selick maintained the acerbic edge that was Dahl's distinctive edge as a children's writer.

***********************************************************

Tim Burton co-produced James and the Giant Peach and it sports similar styles to his live action fairy tales (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland) and his clay or other animation fantasies (Corpse Bride, The Nightmare Before Christmas). It's a UK-based 1996 production and a successful adaptation of yet another Roald Dahl comic horror fable for intelligent children.

Dahl's young heroes are always troubled by evil grown-ups; orphan James's are two spiteful spinster sisters (Joanna Lumley and Miriam Margoyles) merrily sneering at the surreal scenery of their seaside hilltop.

James was a first-time boy actor, Paul Terry, who appeared in a few children's TV episodes, played in a band at uni and never returned to the entertainment industry. The only other major human being in the scene-setting intro is an elderly mystery man (Pete Postlethwaite) who gives the ill-used lonely lad a bag of crocodile tongues, one of which turns into the titular Giant Peach.

The enormous deus ex machina has no personality per se. Instead it is home for a wrangling group of animated insects with a variety of powers and personalities: star-voiced by Simon Callow, Richard Dreyfuss, Jane (later Frasier TV regular) Leeves, Susan Sarandon and David Thewlis. When James flees his horrible aunts and enters the peach, he becomes a stop-motion animation figure too, as a charming accidental hero leading the peach and his new friends on their flight to NYC courtesy of spider web strings attached to a flock of seagulls.

Their trip is packed with fearsome adventures and several insect songs and dances (cue the ubiquitous Randy Newman). Infant viewers may gyrate, adults will ho-and-hum: the material is better than children's TV, but it isn't old-style hand-drawn Disney cartoon quality. It has a grittier less homely quality.

All ends well in NYC, except for the aunts; and director Henry Selick (Nightmare with Burton, and Coraline most recently) rightly maintained the acerbic edge that was Dahl's distinctive edge as a children's writer.

Cowboys & aliens

B

Painfully trying to be comic and cool, like geriatric Harrison Ford.

**********************************************************

There's a great satisfaction to be found in a commercial disaster when it's been engineered by Hollywood honchos high on hubris. As was Cowboys & Aliens.

His self-promotional Wikipedia entry indicates that a Scott Mitchell Rosenberg parlayed a profitable business from comic book rehashes and personnel poaching. His claim to movie business fame was his development of the Men in Black scifi action comedy (a claim IMDb does not appear to credit).

He then, self-reportedly, created the genre-bending concept of a Wild Western town in which a gang of cowboy bandits would be obliged to join forces with a cattle baron's gang, the sheriff's posse and the local Indian tribe to save scores of townsfolk abducted by giant alien bugs whose enormous spaceship is sucking gold out of the hills prior to their eventual destruction of Earth. But there's a hero to unite the anti-ETs: he's an amnesiac escapee from the spaceship and he's taken one of its death ray wrist bracelets.

The resultant screenplay for that indigestible brew of bizarre concepts was written by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, who'd previously collaborated on TV series, The Island and Legend of Zorro (2005), Mission Impossible 3 (2006), Transformers 1 and 2 (2007/9) and the Star Trek reboot (2009): a track record of entertainment blockbusters to make Hollywood accountants salivate.

Yummy, salivated Steven Spielberg, I'll executive produce this sure-fire sucker! Let's spend about US$160 million. My old pal Harrison Ford can play the old rancher. He's very convincing playing old men a la Henry Fonda. We'll pay that Brit Bond Daniel Craig to be the macho antihero with a blank Eastwood-meets-Bronson face.

Somewhere in the Hollywood witches' brewing room, it was realised that the trademark Spielbergian potion of sentimentality was lacking. So the coven added a refugee woman from another planet, the macho man's dead wife, a boy and a dog, the rancher's whimpering bully boy son (Paul Dano) and loyal Indian sidekick - and a kindly preacher and a scared saloon keeper and his Latina wife. A black? No, even Hollywood witches know not to push their luck too far.

Finally, though, to make sure the film was totally incredible and could be seen painfully trying painfully to be comic and cool, like geriatric Harrison, Jon Favreau was given the director's megaphone and the SFX talents were let loose.

Characterless, constantly clanging with cliches, cant and cringe-worthy dialogue, this cornfield of movie-making managed to gross little more than its ludicrously over-ambitious budget. It's probably one of 2011's biggest net losers. Deservedly.

Snowtown

A+

Scruffy world of an irredeemable underclass which finds release in drugs, booze, prayer meetings, and rabble-rousing kitchen gatherings.

**********************************************************

Australian directors continue to excel at suspenseful timing, as Justin Kurzel proves with Snowtown, his debut 2010 feature that's a terrifying movie based on two books about Australia's worst serial killer, John Bunting.

He and his pals' ten victims lived in the suburban slums of Adelaide in the 1990s, in a squalor populated by fundamentalist and homophobic white trash. The docudrama, written by another newbie, Shaun Grant, focuses on Bunting's domineering relationships with a divorced woman and her three under-educated maladjusted teenage sons. He grooms the oldest (16) to become another of his murderous accomplices, pursuing the boy's soul with mesmerising empathetic stares.

Bunting is played brilliantly by the movie's sole professional actor, Daniel Henshall, who'd previously only made a few TV series episodes. Short, stocky, bearded and amiable, he smiles intensively, eyes glinting hypnotically, and it's only on the rare occasions when Bunting loses his cool that his menacing and amoral character is revealed. The rest of the time, he's exercising a quietly effective, controlling personality.

The family he moves into, and its neighbours, are easily-controlled social misfits, some mentally disturbed, some on drugs, mostly surviving on welfare benefits and petty crime. They are depressingly nasty bigots or weak-minded fools, and it becomes clear that Bunting tolerates a local cross-dressing middle-aged homosexual mainly as a source of potential victims.

Bunting's new teenage disciple (played movingly well as a tearful, passive schizophrenic by first-time actor Lucas Pittaway) is the lead to a step-brother who'd raped the boy when he was younger. There's also a palpable tension in the teenager's relationship with Bunting, in which the boy seeks a family role model while Bunting's eyes suggest the killer may be failing to acknowledge his own desires.

The opening urban scenes set the mood and style frighteningly well, as the boys' mother leaves a male neighbour to house-sit with them and he orders the blank-faced kids to strip naked for photographs. Bunting's arrival on the scene soon after begins with him showing the teenager how to cut heads, limbs and tails off newly-shot kangaroos in the back yard. The blood-stained scraps are thrown at the paedophile's bungalow.

Theirs is the muddy, scruffy world of an irredeemable underclass which finds release in drugs, booze, prayer meetings, and rabble-rousing kitchen gatherings reviewing the grisliest ways to punish perverts. This isn't the admirably brave-faced and amusingly-confused working class characters who populate the sets of Mike Leigh and sentimental neo-realists. This is the ugly reality of human failures, characters which a Bunting can feel superior to, manipulate and kill.

Most of the killings take place off-screen, between scenes, and their details and sequence will only be clear if a viewer reads about them in Wikipedia. The one motive for them - fraudulent use of victims' credit cards and benefits - is only hinted at once; Bunting and his three older associates are never shown with jobs, and Bunting guides the boy's enrolment for the dole.

The pace of the editing (and a nerve-jangling musical soundtrack of metallic banging and electronic sounds) amplify the tension, because a viewer's never sure what type of scene will appear next and how draining it will be. The only elongated murder scene, in a bath, is presented with hand-held objectivity, augmenting its almost unbearably vivid impact.

Less positively, several scenes are mysteriously non-linear non-sequitors. Bunting and the teenager shave each other's heads, but are not seen bald-headed again, except once when only Bunting is. Another time, Bunting bullies the boy into shooting Bunting's own dog, but plays with the dog in a subsequent scene. The scenes jut out of the movie, looking like a cluster of deleted scenes that got spliced in arbitrarily to create a two-hour feature.

At the end too, there's a collage of finely photographed images of urban ugliness that appears gratuitous. The ending itself is an abrupt halt, a door firmly shut, suggesting that the teenager has become a cold-hearted tear-less killer too.

End credits then note the prison terms being served by the killers, giving the audience no fairy-tale closure to a human horror show. As a debut movie, though, this is a winner for Kurzel.

Pusher

A+

Within its action-thriller genre, a small-budget masterpiece.

***********************************************************

Nicolas Winding Refn rated highly for Valhalla Rising and Drive; it was time to watch the Danish writer-director's first Pusher movie, his 1996 debut feature, an action-thriller about Copenhagen drug gangsters.

Within its genre, it's a small-budget masterpiece. It won no awards in Denmark other than a Best Supporting Actor accolade for Croatian-born Zlatko Buric (as Milo, the Yugoslav top drug dealer). Unfortunately for Refn, the competition that year included not only Lars von Trier's Oscar-nominated Breaking The Waves but another multi-award-winner, Jan Troell's Hamsun, starring Max von Sydow.

And that was also unfortunate for Kim Bodnia, a stage actor taking his first major screen role as stocky, tattooed Frankie, a middle-ranking dealer with an attitude problem and a girlfriend who's a whore keeping her heart of gold open for him. He has a loyal best friend too, Tonny, played with dazzling flair by then-young Mads (Casino Royale, After the Wedding, Clash of the Titans) Mikkelsen, sporting a bald head with the word Respect tattooed on it.

Day by captioned day, the docudrama-style plot and hand-held cameras follow the week of Frankie's progress from carefree contentment to imminent death, while deals are made, go wrong, and lead to gory deaths and mutilation. Refn's Copenhagen is a low-lit, shadowy city that feels as if it belongs in a black-and-white and very noir thriller.

Refn had no training (having abandoned film school after a month, when he gained the funds to transform his projected short into this feature), but his father was a Danish film director and his mother a cinematographer. Childhood environment probably counted for more than genes did, as with the offspring of many other entertainment industry professionals.

Intriguingly, Pusher was remade in 2010, with the same title, as a Hindi-language production set in the UK. Even more amazingly, it's now been re-made again in English as a low-budget British production due for release in 2012; its cast includes Buric reprising his role as Milo.

The finest flattery for the film came from Refn himself. After the failure of his Fear X English-language feature bankrupted his production company, Refn hurriedly wrote and directed two further Pusher drug-dealing thrillers to capitalise on his first film's commercial success. The first sequel (2004) focused on Tonny (Pusher 2: With Blood on my Hands), for which Mikkelsen collected a handful of Best Actor awards; the next (2005) on Milo (Pusher III: I'm The Angel of Death).

Punished

A-

Looks like a mediocre TV series segment, whose lack of tension is announced by bland background music.

****************************************************************

Punished has a slim storyline that could have been compressed into a couple of episodes of a standard TV detective series. But Hong Kong does have a movie industry that needs to deliver Cantonese-language products to cinemas at home and abroad (and dubbed Mandarin versions to mainland cinemas and genuine DVD stores).

The 2010 product from the Milkyway production team (led by Johnny To) can only be damned with faint praise: it's a competent vengeance movie with the crime genre's regular themes of middle-aged male bonding, corporate loyalty, painful violence and unfilial spoilt children.

The first third of the stretched-out 90-minute action thriller piques an audience's interest with flashbacks from and to the choking death of the obnoxious ransomed daughter of a property developer (Anthong Wong as angst-ridden as ever). His palatial home houses a second wife who's a young business brain, a housekeeper who's a black-clad mystery character, and a right-hand man (Richie Ren) who's a divorcee with an objectionably dismissive schoolboy son.

Having already paid 50 million HK dollars for the girl, the developer pays his loyal henchman the same amount to exact revenge on the kidnappers. Observers might want to know who they were and why they killed the girl, even though her death held no dramatic import, but soon realises that they had none either. They are disposed of, brutally, one by one, after low-calibre fisticuffs, and the screenplay had to add an inconsequential sub-plot and schmaltzy surreal conclusion to fill its allotted time.

Director Law-Wing-cheong does nothing to flesh out the skimpy tale. The movie looks like a mediocre TV series segment, whose lack of character or tension is announced feebly by its bland background music.

Drive

A+

Artful use of lighting and shadows, high-decibel retro electronic pop and slow-paced silent pauses, warm close-ups and chilling long shots, created a cinematic experience that's exciting and disturbing.

***************************************************************

Many movies get made by outsiders (from Europe or Sundance) who've attracted attention with their debut efforts and gain bigger productions that seek stylish direction at small cost. In the case of Drive, Nicolas Winding Refn was already a young Danish veteran when he got the director's chair for his fourth English-language feature.

His first was Fear X, a 2003 psychological thriller adapted from a Hubert Selby story by Refn. Its lead actor was an unwise choice: John Turturro's name didn't help at the box office and the film's failure bankrupted Refn's production company. Forced back into Danish-language work, Refn made two sequels to his successful 1996 debut, Pusher, and its successor, Bleeder. Their glossy shock value gained him British production funds for two screenplays: Bronson (2008) and the virtually wordless and visually thrilling Valhalla Rising (2009).

Drive, based on a 2005 crime thriller by James Sallis, is the crisp story of a taciturn garage mechanic and part-time stunt driver who moonlights for robbery gangs. Initially a Universal project for Hugh Jackman, it ended up as a low-budget (US$13 million) indie production headlined by rising Canadian star Ryan Gosling. He reportedly chose Refn to direct the book's screen adaptation (by Iranian Hossein The Wings of the Dove Amini). English Carey Mulligan, got the key female role as a single mother who needs saving from vicious gangsters.

The film is Gosling's latest "breakthrough", like almost every other film he's ever made: The Believer (2001), Murder by Numbers (2002), The Notebook (2004), Half Nelson (2006), Lars and the Real Girl (2007), Oscar-nominated Blue Valentine (2010). With two years' work as a child performer on TV (Mickey Mouse Club), and solid supporting roles recently (Crazy, Stupid, Love and The Ides of March) Gosling has a track record ready for recognition by Oscar voters.

Refn has got the recognition he's deserved for Drive, winning Best Director award at Cannes 2011. It's easy to see and sense why. His artful use of lighting and shadows, high-decibel retro electronic pop and slow-paced silent pauses, warm close-ups and chilling long shots, created a cinematic experience that's exciting and disturbing. There are moments when the facial studies of the actors is just too long for the retention of dramatic pace, and there are gruesome gory blood-letting head-butting scenes whose sense of reality is too real for comfort.

Overall, though, this is a movie that grabs the eyes, ears - and brain - from its sharply-paced car-chase opening action sequence. It's a cleverly constructed screenplay whose key elements could have been B-movie cliches: conflicted criminal (Oscar Isaac), adorable Latino boy, limping older colleague (Bryan Cranshaw), foul-mouthed racially-stereotypical gangsters (Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks), slutty moll (Christina Hendricks).

Such standard characters needed above-average actors, and the whole supporting cast is a galaxy of movie acting talent; they support Gosling well. His toothpick-chewing shyly-smiling quietly-spoken man of vengeance is a very modern anti-hero with the stylishness of a repressed 1980s action hero. His survival at the end of the saga, and his parting drive, into the LA nightscape, left an open option for his reappearance. It would be unwise: a very good film is unlikely to be bettered and the attempt would be commercially and artistically unwise. For now, very wisely, Gosling has stepped into lead role for Refn's next screenplay. It sounds an extra-ordinary concept, set in Bangkok, co-produced with French funds and Kristin Scott-Thomas: something to really look forward to.

Page one: inside the NYT

A+

If columnist David Carr didn't actually inspire Page One: Inside the New York Times, he attracted the focal attention of the documentary's makers.

********************************************************

David Carr, a reformed drug addict and ex-convict, scruffy and off-balance physically, shuffles around the Grey Lady's stylish palace of news like a Method Actor in search of a back alley. Vaguely deadpan, eyes seething, his face looking like a lost character from a Chandler short story, Carr tip-taps his laptop, recording interview notes about media morality with fierce self-righteousness. His existence and survival in the NYT is vital proof of the newspaper's unique character and role.

Inevitably, having been given access to the financially troubled paper's editorial offices and meetings, writer-director Andrew Rossi doesn't dig for dirt. He briefly acknowledges and then totally ignores the role of the NYT's white knight, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, (whose multi-million-dollar loan saved the paper, and will surely give him long-term possession of its valuable real estate.)

Much of the time, the documentary and NYT personnel fret about the future, the actual existence, of the printed newspaper business and the NYT itself. As they see it, the Internet era's media barbarians are not at the gate, they're ransacking the whole castle and destroying its viability.

One of bearded crusty Carr's many dramatic moments is his put-down of Gawker, after the news aggregator's owner joins a debate proposing that the demise of mainstream media is welcomed. Carr holds up a print-out of Gawker's front "page", from which he's cut out all the news items provided for it by the mainstream. There's just a sheet of holes.

Media buffs will enjoy many other moments when the virtues of well-researched news stories and backgrounders are displayed. Even more, they'll savour the Media desk's expose of the despicable characters who took over and pillaged the Tribune group, and Carr's role in forcing its CEO's resignation.

The documentary records an eventful period in the paper's history: Wikileaks was working with it, it was recovering from self-inflicted wounds from a lying journalist and the Iraq-WMD scandal, and the mercenary menace of Rupert Murdoch's empire was becoming clearer. The documentary shows that if ever there was an American institution that's too important to be allowed to fail, it's the NYT.

West is west

A-

With incredible contrivances, the Brit-Paki plot is neither full comedy nor coming-of-age drama, neither culture-bridging nor racially sensitive.

***********************************************************

West is West, released in 2011, was a belated sequel to 1999's East is East, a semi-autobiographical comedy featuring the dysfunctional family of a mixed marriage in the north of English (Salford) in the late 1960s.

Punjabi-born Indian actor Om Puri returned in the role of Pakistani George Khan, grumpy owner of a chippy shop and husband of English Ella (Angela Bassett). It was his 205th credited film role in a 35-year career, her 54th, and their inter-racial love is still credible. Another Indian actor, Rajasthani Ila Arun, provides a strong third adult character as Khan's first wife.

The screenplay's central figures are the family's two half-English sons. The weak-willed elder brother can't find a wife back in his father's home village, while the teenager has coped with racism at school and divided loyalties outside by becoming a truant shoplifter. The father takes him back to Pakistan to force him to accept a Pakistani heritage.

Very much a storyboard construction with incredible coincidences and contrivances, the plot is neither full comedy nor coming-of-age drama, neither culture-bridging nor racially sensitive. There's a stereotypical wry English-speaking sage with no apparent livelihood and a smiling acolyte who becomes the teenager's pal, daughters who have no roles to play, and a nephew who on-screen purpose is never revealed. Loose ends are left loose, except for the older son being married off to a sassy village girl from Rochdale whom he'd never noticed.

Racial characteristics are not explored with wit or insights, and religious factors are ignored completely. Even in the plot's time setting (1976) it is not possible to believe that none of the characters would have thought and talked about Islam, Western materialism and ancestors. Such a world of semi-comic make-believe can just about be imagined in rural Indian Punjab (where the film was made) but not across the border in rural Pakistan.

[Retired UK TV series actor Ayub Khan-din, born in Salford, wrote East is East as an award-winning play, which was staged in London in 1997. It was soon filmed, winning more awards and many for Irish director Damien O'Donnell. Maybe it was better fun.]

Margin call

A+

Commendable effort to present harsh reality of mathematic and materialist thoughts on Wall Street.

***********************************************************

You're a wannabe feature film writer and director, with just one short to your credit. How do you get your project off the ground? One of the better ways is to find an actor with ambition and spare funds who'll star in and co-produce your debut feature.

Zachary Quinto, a US TV series actor (Heroes) who landed the Spock role in the renewed Star Trek movie franchise, was an ideal choice for writer-director J.C. Chandor. He could play a lead role in Chandor's Wall Street docudrama, and help attract a small galaxy of big names for cameo parts as well as encourage enough co-backers. Economically, too: Margin Call was made for only US$3,395,000.

On the strength of that potentially highly profitable venture, Chandor gained a two-film writing deal from Warner Brothers, working with one of Leonardo DiCaprio's production companies. His indie debut feature is a docudrama inspired by the Lehman Brothers collapse, profiling the overnight reactions of a Wall Street firm's leading players to the discovery that over-exposure to bad market positions could wipe out the company.

Such a contemporary parable of greed and amorality depends on credible characters, and Chandor's are mostly very believable market and personnel manipulators. The plot is reminiscent of David Mamet, but without that stage playwright's larger-than-life histrionics.

The one actor in the galaxy who shines brightest is Jeremy Irons as the fiercely wily English chief executive. Quinto wisely didn't over-emphasise his own role as a real rocket scientist working in the firm's risk assessment department, standing aside and letting Paul Bettany, Kevin Spacey, Simon Baker, Demi Moore and Stanley Tucci inhabit the heights of Wall Street.

Chandor's non-flashy direction maintains an increasing tension for the first hour, while the firm's options and inevitable scheme to sacrifice some staff and betray the system are debated. The scheme's implementation is a rushed conclusion, messily adorned with a symbolic burial scene that's derisory rather than dramatic. Overall, though, the feature is a commendable effort to present some of the harsh reality of mathematic and materialist thoughts which create the atmosphere sustaining Wall Street.

Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy

A-

Le Carre's plot was more of a period overview, a socio-political portrait, than a straightforward spy thriller.

************************************************************

Viewing the original BBC TV serialisation (1979) of John Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy before watching its 2011 movie version ensures that one knows who the mole is. This has two advantages.

Undistracted by red herrings, one can better assess the screenplay's ability to compress almost five TV hours of dense, albeit slow-paced, drama into two hours of cinema. And compare two generations of British actors (and cameos by two actresses).

After 32 years, the TV serial was a mixed blessing on its BBC DVD. Good value is given by a one-hour documentary extra, The Secret Centre, made in 2000. It includes an interesting set of autobiographical comments by Le Carre, excerpts from the Smiley films, interviews with relevant figures (his ex-wife, college mentor, KGB and East German spymasters), and readings from the books (by Le Carre himself, aka in the real world as David Cornwell). If only more money had been spent on re-mastering the seven TV episodes' fluctuating sound and murky lighting. Their award-winning direction (James Irvin) and cinematography were diminished by the antique film qualities.

Although the serial looked its age, its dialogue rarely sounded dated. It'll be interesting to hear how the 2011 version presents bitter anti-materialist opinions that match those of the current Occupy movement.

It's easy to see how almost redundant characters in Le Carre's plot could have been dropped for the modern movie, including Smiley's nymphomaniac wife (Sian Griffiths), an exasperated schoolmaster (John Wells), a sacked research maestro (Beryl Reid), exasperating ex-spies (Nigel Stock and Joss Ackland) and an eight-year-old schoolboy who's a retired agent's protege (credited as "Duncan Jones", and already looking like the adult film director son of David Bowie, even though Jones's PR reps or IMDb haven't yet wanted to put two and two together).

The discredited spy (Hywel Bennett) who provides information leading to the mole plays a bigger role in the storyboard, too big, seemingly being an excuse both for some overseas location filming in Lisbon and the appearance of a female agent and sexual side-attraction in Le Carre's novel. Le Carre's key KGB maestro, Karla, is seen only as a non-speaking role in a flashback showing Smiley's feeble efforts to turn him (an unrecognisable bearded Patrick Stewart).

Such gratuitous roles were sharp reminders that Le Carre's plot was more of a period overview, a socio-political portrait, than a straightforward spy thriller. The identity of Russia's mole in the British secret service is signposted very early, simply because he's the only one of four possible traitors shown to have relationships with other people. All members of the quartet are stereotypical figures of post-War Britain, the upper class providing a glib bisexual cynic, a pompous fool and an embittered poseur, while the working class was mined for a Communist thug's son holding a technical role in the corridor of power.

Many of them smoked and puffed pipes heavily; that will have to be revised in 2011? And the homosexual overtones (Le Carre's acknowledgment of the characters of two among the "Cambridge Five" spies) might need spelling out even more clearly for modern audiences? If so, the preparatory school setting for another character may well be abandoned for the film to better fit into mainstream US audiences' comfort zone.

The lead characters in the 1979 serial must be the same in 2011. Chief investigator and forcibly retired spymaster Smiley (deadpan Alec Guinness) wasn't as cunning as my memory had expected, while the betrayed spy (close to emotive Ian Bannen) played a larger role than it recalled. The only active brain in the intelligence "Circus" (Ian Richardson) brought his saucer-lidded cup of tea into meetings in a giveaway fashion, just like a disaffected outsider would, and Smiley's aide (Michael Jayston) was too clever and loyal by half to have been allowed to remain in the service.

Although Smiley and his team, and the top civil servant empowering him unofficially, mention concerns about the mole being aware of their activities, his apparent total failure to do so is hard to credit (but may well illustrate the Oxbridge amateurishness of British espionage during the Cold War).

Is the 2011 version a deeper study of intelligence masters at work? Its task is easier, in my eyes, after the relative flatness of the 1979 original.

Alive and kicking

A-

Pioneer stirring of every known feature of the dance and AIDS genres into a very acceptable emotional stew.

*************************************************************************

Originally entitled Indian Summer, the 1996 British feature Alive and Kicking was an early tale of gay love and AIDS written by UK-based American playwright Martin Sherman (best known for Bent and Mrs Henderson Presents). Stage director Nancy Meckler directed the dance drama starring Jason Flemyng as an H-positive ballet star who rejects AIDS treatments in order to continue his career, his real life.

Antony Sher is the AIDS psychotherapy specialist who successfully woos the dancer; every other character is in the dancer's world (including Bill Nighy as the sympathetic company manager and Dorothy Tutin as its Alzheimer's-suffering founding choreographer).

Sherman achieves a screenwriting mission impossible, stirring every known feature of the dance and AIDS genres into a very acceptable emotional stew. The dancers are insecure posturing egotists with big hearts, the lead dancer has a black dyke best friend with a working-class accent, handsome young people get lesions and die, cameras pirouette around agonised faces, gay sexual activity is photographed with cunning lighting schemes, and the whole movie feels as clearly marked for emotional moments as a ballet floor is with spots.

The movie overcomes its screenplay's painstaking contrivances largely due to the credible facial reactions and body language from Flemyng and Sher. Their characters bond in an unlikely pairing, and Sherman's dialogue has memorable moments raging about AIDS. More noticeably, there's a tedious over-dependence on ironic American-accented cliches (which were possibly all de rigeur in London dance circles in the 1990s).

At first sighting, this well-acted mainstream treatment of AIDS and homosexuality should have become a global festival favourite and potential award-winner. It wasn't, maybe because it cast its dramatic net too wide to appeal strongly enough to dancers or the gay market.

Undertow

A-

Simple macho maturity from Peru; as gay movies go, it's one of the better on the festival circuit.

***********************************************************

A scenario that's credible, emotional and dramatic is a rarity in the gay genre (in which even Brokeback Mountain somewhat failed the first criterion). Undertow (Contracorriente) may therefore have been over-rated by the critics, who've been very kind to the debut feature by Peruvian writer-director and co-editor Javier Fuentes-Leon. He also earned the Audience Award at the Miami and Sundance film festivals in 2010, and his Colombian and Franco-German producers deserve big kudos for backing his breakthrough movie (12 years after he directed the first of his two short movies).

The storyline, screenplay and directorial style are observant and restrained. A happily married bearded fisherman in a Peruvian coastal village has also been the secret lover of a well-off bearded painter who stays in the village every year. Villagers have suspicions about the painter but not their dutiful Catholic fishing colleague, who's first seen leading the rites for a dead man's burial at sea after listening to the foetus of his pregnant wife's first child.

When the painter drowns at sea after an offshore tryst and tiff, his ghost returns to the village, visible only to the lover who wouldn't/couldn't acknowledge his existence in life. They chat and embrace, and the former non-believer pleads for the ritual burial and consequent eternal peace, not wishing to be an invisible lover with no contact with reality other than the fisherman. To achieve his lover's wish, the fisherman must come out as a bisexual, accepting his wife's desertion, villagers' hostility and the painter's family pressures.

There are just enough artfully composed scenes of water, sand, fishing boats, male posteriors and village panoramas (cinematographer Mauricio Vidal) to give the movie art-house appeal, while the dialogue and ensemble acting are natural enough to avoid the customary Latin American label of "magical realism". Characters and situations are neatly designed to jerk sympathetic tears but manage to avoid eye-rolling cliches. There's no cop-out "happy" ending; the movie has a simple macho maturity. As gay movies go, it's one of the better on the festival circuit.

Quattro volte

A+

Mind-boggling cinematic pretentiousness ... in a fascinating offbeat art-house creation.

***********************************************************

How much of cinema's status as an art form depends on cinematography? Films with little dialogue and many images blur definitions, as Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times) does. An NYT critic thought the Italian movie "reinvents the very act of perception", which amounts to a warning to be prepared for mind-boggling cinematic pretentiousness.

As with his debut feature, The Gift (2003), writer-director Michelangelo Frammartino went on location in Calabria for his 2010 docudrama. In the first segment of the quartet of episodes, an old goatherd subsists on the fringe of a medieval town clustered atop a steep hunchback hill. He dies (after 40 minutes), and the next focal point is a newborn goat, whose fumbling infancy is observed for 20 minutes until it loses itself and goes to sleep (or death) amid the roots of an ancient fir tree.

The tree is cut down by the townspeople for an annual festival, sporting a stark tree canopy far above the town's roofs. Then it is chopped up and added to an intricately constructed charcoal oven (seen in full smoky operation in the movie's pre-title opening sequence). The charcoal is distributed, and smoke rises, as it has intermittently during the film, from a chimney on the town's roofscape.

Are the four segments a cycle of reincarnation? Or facets of the divine comedy of human life and vast variety of nature? Or, as a cynic might suspect, one shortish dramatic film with a trio of scenic documentary shorts deployed to double the overall length to one closer to that of a full feature.

The old man's story is an exquisitely composed slow-paced non-speaking parade of set pieces, a storyboard movie that turns fine photographic images into moving pictures. Many are bewitching, such as those illustrating the goatherd's ritual potions of holy dust and his awareness of an ant crossing his face. One long-pan depiction of a barking herd dog causing a runaway lorry to unloose the goats is a wonderful comic compilation, delightfully plotted and stage-managed. Similarly, the goat kids' gambols are deftly-edited, delightful documentary fun.

The lack of dialogue and background music is no handicap: attention is focused on the dogs' barks, the goats' bleats, their clanking bells, the occasional lorry trip, the dying herder's coughs.

This movie may not warrant four viewings, but a second is deserved: cinematographer Andrea Locatelli is another young talent well boosted by this offbeat art-house creation.

Horrible bosses

B-

Foul-mouthed incredible screenplay about three white male losers conspiring to kill impossibly nasty bosses.

***********************************************************

Slightly more frequently than a blue moon, a movie is so badly written that a viewer with more than one brain cell will soon abandon all hope of it developing interesting plot lines or characters. It will be walked out of or ejected. Horrible Bosses is one such stinker. The key facts to note are the names of the people responsible for it, to ensure one approaches their future efforts with much caution.

The foul-mouthed story and totally incredible screenplay about three white male losers conspiring to kill their impossibly nasty bosses were created by Michael Markowitz, a US TV series writer who worked on Becker and Duckman. It appears that he accumulated a bottom drawer of story ideas and supposed jokes that had been judged too racist, homophobic, misogynistic or crude for TV, and recycled them into a movie concept, reportedly earning a six-figure auction bid from New Line Cinema.

Six years later, the screenplay had been adjusted by him and a pair of other writers. Young John Francis Daley, a TV series actor (Bones), had previously written a screenplay just once, for an episode of Bones. Older Jonathan Goldstein was a veteran TV series producer who'd also never written for the cinema previously.

Another TV specialist, Seth Gordon, got the director's chair. His only previous movie feature was Four Christmases, a seasonal effort for New Line starring Vince Vaughan; it was relatively successful (its box office gross doubling its hefty US$80 million budget).

Horrible Bosses had a more sensible budget of less than US$40 million, despite having a trio of minor star names playing the ludicrously non-amusing bosses (Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Spacey and Colin Farrell). Another fading star, Jamie Foxx, took a humiliating cameo as a black murder consultant called "Motherfucker", apparently changed at his request from "Cocksucker". There are quite a lot of cock-sucking jokes strewn around the self-proclaimed black comedy.

The trio of "pussies" plotting their bosses' demise are typical 21st century Hollywood serio-comic anti-heroes (a la Hangover etc), played with stereotypical wry grins and wan smiles by bland actors. Charlie Day, a youngish supporting player in Drew Barrymore's Going The Distance, cringes as a registered sex offender working for offensively lustful Jewish dentist Aniston. Middle-aged TV comedian Jason (SNL and 30 Rock) Sudeikis is a dead-pan accountant for Farrel's coke-snorting imbecile boss, and charming Jason (Arrested Development) Bateman looks very tired of being an inconsequential foil for Spacey's megalomaniac character.

None of the bosses are OTT comic figures, not even black-comedic symbols. None of the anti-heroes deserve chuckles or cheers, yet this film's box office gross truly was: US$210 million and still counting, before going to DVD. The coven of writers must know they've found a mother lode: all those obscene and inanely unfunny ideas they dust-binned during TV brainstorms will sell tickets galore to movie-goers eager to wet themselves in a cascade of dirty words.

Crazy, stupid, love

A-

Tangy bitter chocolate becomes saccharine mush.

***********************************************************

When two talents direct a scintillating, satirical and star-studded debut comedy about a gay con man, their admirers will let them make such a way-above-average comedy about anything. Directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa almost did, lining up Steve Carrel, Julianne Moore and Ryan Gosling for their second intricate romantic comedy Crazy, Stupid, Love., written by Dan Fogelman. The seemingly redundant punctuation marks are a sign of the production team's awareness of verbal values (visibly not shared by the distribution company's poster design).

The directorial duo's first little-seen (in the USA) comic mini-masterpiece was I Love You Phillip Morris. Its screenplay, an adaptation of a biographical magazine article, was co-written by them too. Their previous writing included Bad Santa (way above average too) and Cats & Dogs. Fogelman's track record was built on cartoon screenplays (Cars, Bolt, Tangled), which are tough testing grounds for comic inventiveness.

For its opening half-hour, the trio's joint effort was a classic in the making, a sequence of cunningly comic introductions to its lead characters: a nervously talkative wife (Moore) shocking her laid-back husband (Carell) by announcing her desire for a divorce; their 13-year-old son telling his 17-year-old baby-sitter, after she's found him masturbating, that she's his fantasy passion; her trying to tell Carell that she adores him; and self-pitying Carell getting adopted by a kind-hearted bar-hopping ladies man (Gosling) who promises to teach him how to make his wife rue her folly.

The consequent plot permutations show early potential, especially in cameo parts for Marisa Tomei and Kevin Bacon as the married couple's adulterous flings. The direction and editing are snappy, edgily and funnily so in terms of camera angles and timing.

For their debut feature, portraying madcap manic farce (finely carried off by Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor as gaily besotted homosexuals), the directors could get away (outside North America) with very gay surrealist satire because it was a true story. Unfortunately, for their new fully fictional film, they and Fogelman had to conform to Hollywood rules: it must have a happy ending adorned with family values, a sermon about love, and brave smiles.

In ye olden days of self-censored Hollywood, couples were compelled to be married, always wear pyjamas, and never have both feet off the bedroom floor at the same time. Even in 21st-century Hollywood, cynics and cads must be redeemed, infidelity rued and forgiven, while teenagers must be shown to understand that they love their parents even more.

Such a screenplay cop-out also marred the end of Little Miss Sunshine. Once again, tangy bitter chocolate becomes saccharine mush, satisfying the movie-going needs of sweet-toothed North American families and their hypocritical movie industry. This potentially above-average has earned a small fortune obeying the rules; chocolate connoisseurs might abandon it half-way.

Kung fu panda 2

A+

More action-packed than the first, if less character-driven, a successful extension into the 3D dimension.

************************************************************

The most favourable comment on Kung Fu Panda 2 is that it looks (in 2D) as if it's an unusually effective if over-busy usage of 3D effects.

The original CGI cartoon movie's creatures reappear (with the same megastar voices). The colourings are lovely to look at, and one new creature (a China-threatening peacock) has a much more expressive face and character than the bland "Famous Five" heroes helping the obese and mildly comic panda anti-hero perform his predestined duties.

The peacock's finely boo-able voice is that of yet another Brit-accented gift to conniving cartoon-world villainy (Gary Oldman, channeling moments from Jeremy Irons et al). Jack Black is inoffensively easy to listen to as the bumbling hero. Dustin Hoffman self-effaces well as the divinely patient kung fu master. Less admirably, James Hong's characterisation of the panda's father figure, a noodle-shop-owning duck (Mr Ping), sounds almost racially offensive, depicting the obsequious creature as a whining maudlin Chinese hand-wringer.

Director Jennifer Yuh might claim that character is true to human life. She surely deserves great credit for her debut feature, having been promoted by Dreamworks from her leading artist role on the first Panda. For that she composed a bewitching sequence of Chinese-style shadow puppetry, which is utilised well again as the intro to the fast-paced CGI saga.

More action-packed than the first, if less character-driven, this is a successful franchise extension into the 3D dimension and good ocular entertainment. That's all, folks, and that's good enough.

Limitless

Limitless is a good old-fashioned B movie with an up-and-coming near-the-top actor (Bradley Cooper) and director (Neil Burger).

Yale-grad Burger made his mark as a writer-director in 2002 with a mockumentary, Interview with the Assassin, telling a clever fiction of JFK's "second" assassin. Four years later, Burger had worked with some of Hollywood's top talents, directing his own screenplay adaptation of a Steven Millhauser short story, The Illusionist. Starring Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti, it won many nominations and awards for its composer (Philip Glass), costume designer (Ngila Dickson), lead actress (Jessica Biel) and cinematographer Dick Pope, (the British long-time associate of Mike Leigh also collecting his first Oscar nod).

Burger's Iraq-veterans comedy, The Lucky Ones (2008), co-written by him, had a less stellar line-up (Rachel McAdams, Tim Robbins and Michael Pena) and didn't win box office or award kudos. Maybe that was why he was next given a directing-only job, where the irony is that his zoom-along kinetic imagery is such refreshing cinema it makes the screenplay by Leslie (Hairspray update) Dixon seem a flimsy framework. The talent of a Burger as a co-writer was needed for the adaptation of the first (2001) novel, The Dark Fields, by Irish writer Alan Glynn. He'd followed the scifi-reality path well-trodden by Philip Dick, imagining a drug that would enable a man to have instant access to all global knowledge, a "limitless" ability to know everything, be a real stock exchange master of the world, and learn any foreign language.

In such supernatural fairy tales, the drug will have unpleasant side-effects (great excuses for a director to show off technical skills with multiple zoom and fish-eye lenses). There will also be a scheming corporate master-mind (another excuse for Robert De Niro to sell his talent for sweet-talking nastiness) and cruel gangsters (Russian, of course). Throw in a long-suffering girlfriend and an addicted ex-wife, for limited female attractions, and the formulaic product just needs its charismatic male lead.

Until now, Bradley Cooper had usually been type-cast as a comic co-lead actor, adding a handsome lack of depth to the very shallow Hangover franchise and Sandra Bullock's All About Steve. The TV series veteran (Alias, Nip/Tuck) sensibly invested his own capital in the highly profitable movie, his first production venture. Cooper will not be a Cruise but, with four other features due out in the next two years (one with De Niro as his supporting co-star again), he's a potential Cage. His bank account won't care if it's damned with such faint praise.

Cameraman

Cameraman, a documentary overview of "The Life & Work of Jack Cardiff", appeared in 2010, the year after the Oscar-winning 94-year-old British cinematographer died. Directed by Craig McCall, who also edited and produced the tribute feature, it expands on McCall's previous short studies of Cardiff's use of cameras as an artistic medium, showing how much Cardiff was consciously inspired by artists as varied as Vermeer, Turner and the Impressionists.

The cross-references are truly illuminating, unlike the humdrum words of praise from Hollywood celebrities and some of the director-cameraman's living leading ladies. Cardiff's genius with colour composition, shadows and framing is confirmed though, most clearly in the one Oscar nomination of his that succeeded: for The Black Narcissus, in 1948 (also winning the Golden Globe that year). He gained other cinematography nods for Fanny (1962) and War and Peace (1957); in 2001 he was awarded the first Honorary Oscar given to a cameraman (who was commended as a "master of light and color").

Although he directed more than a dozen commercial features, he only had one major success. In 1961, Sons and Lovers earned an Oscar for its B&W cinematographer, Freddie Francis (another Brit), and eight more nominations, including one for Cardiff as director. He did collect a Golden Globe for it as best drama director, but Billy Wilder's comedy The Apartment was that year's Oscar-winner.

It would have been interesting to hear Cardiff talk about his two jobs' differences and their particular difficulties, and why he found it necessary to re-focus his career behind the camera after the British film industry collapsed. His life from clapper boy to Rocky II's cameraman covered seven decades, and he appeared to be a modest talent who chose to memorise funny moments on and off the sets rather than the "hypocrisy and hyperbole" that he found in Hollywood. The trouble with modesty is that it can make its subject seem inconsequential.

Shine a light

The Rolling Stones in concert, as seen by Martin Scorsese. What more needs to be said? Shine a Light (issued in 2008) is a set of slick recordings, an exciting tribute and a wry documentary as well as a superb showcase for five extraordinary old men (including Scorsese himself, once again showing himself off as a film editor with an exceptional ear for pop music).

Seven cinematographers were at work in New York's Beacon Theater at the end of 2006 for the special charity concerts staged during the band's A Bigger Bang Tour. The last show was attended by Bill Clinton, his family and invitees, whose photo ops were better managed than the music line-up. Scorsese doesn't get the song list until a moment before the Stones strut on stage for their opening number, Jumpin' Jack Flash.

Smurfs

The Smurfs was a 1958 Belgian creation, a comic book (Les Schtroumpfs) for a nation that possibly needs a big sense of humour in order to contemplate itself. Their world of teeny blue comic creatures, featured in an animated series on US TV from 1981 to 1990, was finally licensed for a big-budget (Sony Animations) Hollywood production. Issued in 2011, scorned by the critics, it scooped up half-a-billion US dollars globally at the box office. The sequel, quickly green-lighted, will appear in 2013.

By then, a new generation of 6-10-year-olds (the cute, coy and cuddly creatures' natural market) will be ready to drag their parents off to premium-priced 3D cinema seats for depressingly derivative CGI-figure-populated live-action farce. By then, Neil Patrick Harris, a TV sitcom and Broadway stage star, may regret having accepted the lead human role, even if his bank account is healthier. The producers will have decided whether huge-nosed shaved-head Hank Azaria should be allowed to reappear (with his CGI-manipulated ginger tom accomplice) and again overact madly (as any other self-respecting comic actor would do to keep his sanity in such a film).

Director Raja Gosnell was already a known talent for his pedestrian (and occasionally commercially successful) directorial efforts on seven other comic efforts: Home Alone 3, Drew Barrymore's Never Been Kissed and Beverly Hills Chihauhua, Martin Lawrence's Big Momma's House, two Scooby Doos, and Dennis Quaid's Yours, Mine and Ours.

This time too, he didn't have much to work with. The lookalike bug-eyed pug-nosed Smurf characters have one-note traits revealed by their names (a la 7 Dwarfs), their world is threatened by an evil wizard (a la Tolkien etc), they have a portal to NYC (a la Enchanted), and the self-proclaimed screenplay-writers shall be nameless: a few wordplays winked in the direction of parents don't justify paying dutiful attention to the petty plot and trite dialogue.

Kids loved it, Drew must love Raja, and that's Hollywood reality.

Arietty

At the end of 2009, Studio Ghibli promoted one of its chief animators, Hiromasa Yonebayashi, into the director's chair for The Secret World of Arietty. Based on Mary Norton's classic (1952) English children's novel The Borrowers, the tale of the endangered species of tiny household spirits had already inspired many English-language film versions (most recently another BBC production, starring Stephen Fry, Christopher Eccleston and Victoria Wood).

Ghibli and its co-founder Hayao Miyazaki won the animation Oscar in 2002 for Spirited Away (the first foreign-language film to do so) and may hope to do the same when Disney distributes the latest film in North America in February 2012. It won't.

It suffers from the disadvantages of Miyazaki's dominant themes. When a story doesn't have enough action, interesting characters and pacing, the studio's customary motifs of ecological awareness, feminism, anti-capitalism, humanity and pacifism are pretty tedious.

The Borrrowers was a gentle, genteel saga, a pining for older days and ways, and it lent itself ideally to Miyazaki's ethos. The only child of a house's last couple of surviving Borrowers, 14-year-old Arietty, is introduced by her father to the frightening world of the huge humans, from which small essential supplies must be "borrowed". In scenes of miniaturisation akin to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Arietty is spied by the sickly boy of the house, who befriends her and helps her family escape from the clutches of a grumpy housekeeper.

The hand-drawn imagery of ivy, raindrops, hidden passageways and spring flowers is brilliantly imagined, manoeuvred and coloured. Such work is a world away from the traditions of Disney or Pixar, and the Japanese conventions of adorable big-eyed children, animals with conflicted characters and boo-able grouchy old ladies are maintained handsomely. There just aren't enough dramatic developments or side-attractions to grab a non-Japanese viewer's attention. The specially-commissioned music (by Cecile Corbel, the French-Bretonne singer and harpist whose sound resembles that of New Agers such as Ireland's Enya) has a similar languor.

[The DVD version watched had an unfortunate typo in otherwise excellent subtitles: the Borrowers' neighbours are called "human beans".]

Johnny English reborn

Sometimes a pastiche imitates its source too lovingly to be as funny as it could be. That's the case for Johnny English Reborn, a 2011 re-appearance for Rowan Atkinson's bumbling Bond-ish Brit spy. Looking as good for his age as Connery and Moore did at the end of their 007 stints, 56-year-old Atkinson is still a good actor with a gurning face, bulging eyes, squirming physique and unique screen presence.

The writing team knew what they were doing. Lead co-writer William Davies, for whom Arnie's Twins was a happy first feature, had co-written the original Johnny English (2003). Second-credited writer Hamish McColl had joined Atkinson and his long-time comic associate Richard Curtis on Mr Bean's Holiday (2007). Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (both given "characters" credits) worked on the first English film and co-wrote the last four real Bond films. They're together as usual for "Bond 23" too, now being directed by Sam Mendes.

Which might explain why much of JE2 comprises concepts and scenes derived from the JB franchise. Viewers who tire of watching Atkinson can amuse their memories instead, recalling when JB went into high-speed action in the Alps, at sea, in souped-up Rollers, etc.

All the usual characters are in action, played by an assortment of British acting talent: Johnny's female espionage boss (honorary Brit Gillian Anderson), MI7's suave Eton-educated double-dealing Agent 1 (Dominic West), a severely-disabled gadget boffin (Tim McInnerny), a beautiful MI7 behaviourist destined to save and love Johnny (Rosamund Pike, whose first big-screen major role was in JB's Die Another Day) and a naif 20-year-old black Brit assistant agent (talented and handsome Daniel Chatroom Kaluuya).

Remarkably, JE2 manages to look like a lavishly-produced update of an early Bond film, and director Oliver Parker should gain kudos for making a $27 million budget fill a wide screen so handsomely.

What matters most is spoofs, send-ups and sly variations that both display Atkinson's comic skills and the writers' creativity. Early on, hopes are raised high by a lengthy sequence of ingenious comic ploys enabling the ageing JE to chase and outwit a lithe Chinese gangster over Kowloon roofs and Hong Kong harbour. It's a typical Bond conceit, well-paced and musically thunderous, which maintains a tricky balance of silliness and smartness for the JE character. Maybe that set the bar too high too quickly, and the film's comic volume became muted when JE went into action in Switzerland (protecting China's premier from an assassin).

The Chinese angle played well for a key market, and Atkinson and his producers again shrewdly screened their movie widely in overseas markets months before they let it open in either the UK or North America, where critics could be expected to pooh-pooh it. Once again, the move paid off: JE knows where Mr Bean's most loyal fans live. They know that Atkinson will deliver above-average comic entertainment, and he does.