Carnage

B

Petty social commentary whose direction adds nothing visibly special and quartet of stars posture lazily.

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A successful stage play becomes a worthwhile movie if its narrative intensity is heightened by close-ups of actors' faces and reactions. God of Carnage, Yasmina Reza's French comedy of modern parental manners, was a hit in Paris and then (translated by Christopher Hampton) in London and New York, and might have been the basis for a movie triumph in the mode of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Like that stage and cinema classic, the French satirical, farcical and bitter comedy had a quartet of strong acting roles; it was retitled as Carnage, and got an accomplished director (Roman Polanski).

Unfortunately, a whole generation has passed since Edward Albee wrote his truly dramatic play (1962) about an academic's acerbic marriage, for which Mike Nichols directed the 1966 on-screen magic pairing of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. By comparison, four decades later, Reza's 70-minute extended sketch is a weak concoction.

Maybe Hampton's original translation worked well in the theatre. Given a new translation by another writer (suggesting Hampton's disapproval of the film production), which was turned into a screenplay by Reza and Polanski, the story looks and sounds more of a petty social commentary than any sort of indictment of modern parenting or social attitudes. The direction adds nothing visibly special, and the talented quartet of stars posture lazily.

Jodie Foster is an uptight socially-aware very PC prig married, incredibly, to a flabby bullied red-neck housewares manufacturer (John C Reilly). Similarly, Kate Winslet is the ill-matched socially-vacuous second wife of a sneering corporate attorney (Christoph Waltz) who lives through his mobile phone. All four are phony stereotypical metropolitan characters, who've met to deal with the fact that one son knocked out two of the other couple's son's teeth.

The couples' dramatic highlights are the off-screen abandonment of a hamster, and vomit on precious art volumes. The prickly quartet exchange niceties, barbed insults and drunken confidences, and the non-drama's theatrical box-office success may have depended on one actress having to vomit on stage in each performance. In the movies, that's no big deal and nothing else is worth watching.

Devil's double

B

Feebly-linked sequence of cliched scenes for Dominic Cooper's dual role as Saddam son and his double.

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Michael Thomas wrote a few screenplays based on novels or reality in the 1980s, including Scandal (the fact-based tale of a UK politician, prostitutes and Russian spies). In the 1990s, Thomas's Backbeat dramatised the fate of an original Beatle. His latest effort (2011) created a docudrama from the characters of Uday Hussein, Saddam's sadistic oldest son, and the Iraqi lieutenant lookalike (and former classmate) who was compelled to act as The Devil's Double.

The unlucky doppelganger, Latif Yahia, survived to write novels about his dangerous life inside the gilded, debauched, evil palaces of Iraq's "Black Prince". Inevitably, given the man's collaboration on the screenplay (and an uncredited bit part), he's depicted as a moderate moralist who saved his family's lives by taking Uday's place in public and in dangerous situations. The screenplay also shows Saddam and one of his doubles at work but doesn't explain why the dictator's younger son, Qusay, didn't play the same game.

The key factor for such a movie plot is the actor playing the superficially identical characters, and Dominic Cooper fills the two pairs of shoes attractively. This could have been the breakthrough movie for the young English actor, after various good supporting roles recently (An Education, Captain America, Brief Interviews), but Thomas and/or his producers (Europeans) opted not for a subtle psycho-political character study but for the R-rated Caligula/Scarface type of bio-drama, including rapes, beatings, cocaine snorts, wild gunfire and a dis-embowelling.

They gave the directing job to a known talent, New Zealander Lee (Die Another Day, Next, Along Came a Spider) Tamahori (who'd only worked on action-adventures after the failure of Mulholland Falls in 1996 and the lost promise of his 1994 multi-award-winning Once Were Warriors). Maybe the screenplay he had to work with already included poor-quality newsreel clips from Iraq's wars with Iran, Kuwait and the US, as well as its feebly-linked sequence of visually and verbally cliched scenes.

The overall tone is patronising and semi-racist. All characters speak English with bad accents, which demeans them, a la Arab stooges for Indiana Jones etc (except, remarkably, on account of his actor's facial firmness, Saddam). Cooper's two loads of changing accents are interchangeable, whether he's camply maniacal Uday or primly outraged Latif.

Uday's henchmen are heavy-smoking slouching mafiosi, the female interest who deserts Uday for Latif is an undesirably deadpan actress, and Latif's mournful court mentor and indiscreetly gay social organiser are dramatic contrivances with no dramatic purposes.

There possibly was an interesting story to be woven from the life and times of Uday/Latif. Let's hope the screenplay/s that will docu-dramatise Gaddafi's heir apparent will be a better vehicle for another deserving actor.

Winnie the Pooh

A-

Old-style tribute to older tastes, adorned modestly with golden honey scenery, childish songs and cute 2-dimensional use of printed words.

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Disney's first animated feature based on the Winnie the Pooh tales of AA Milne (The Many Adventures of WtP), issued in 1977, combined three existing featurettes. Consequently, the 2011 "remake" is effectively the Pooh's first dramatised animated feature. Mistakenly, at little more than an hour long, it's not a full-length movie. That surely partly accounted for its relatively poor gross box office takings: only US$33 million globally, barely covering half its reported budget cost of US$30 million.

It's a sweet movie, fittingly for the ever-hungry honey-loving bear. The hand-made drawings are the usual old-fashioned Disney delight, the cels creatively given CGI visual enhancement through the cute device of using the books' printed words, paragraphs, letters and pages as film-stage props.

English accents are rightly maintained for all the characters, from Christopher Robin (a very characterless schoolboy) to Pooh and his pals. Jim Cummings voices both the bear and Tigger, while John Cleese enunciates the narration well, without histrionics. Other voices remind the audience that Eyeore, Piglet, Kanga and Roo are very thin characters and boring fall guys.

Adult jokes or wordplays are rare, though long, big words remain the semi-comic speciality of pompous Owl. Overall, this is a simple tale designed for pre-teens. There are minor potential threats from a forest setting and a comic yeti-like Heffalump (whose appearance at the end suggests a putative spin-off that won't happen).

The short duration of the film, and the relatively small budget, indicate a lack of fully-funded confidence in the old product by Disney's animation team (now headed by Pixar's John Lasseter). They created an old-style tribute to older tastes, adorning it modestly with golden honey scenery, childish songs and an appropriate two-dimensional use of printed pages in honour of Milne's original book and its classic characters. More likely, their primary intention was to create advertising material for valuable Pooh merchandise.