Review: Summer of the Flying Saucer (1/5); Before The Rains (3/5); Elite Squad (2/5); The Mummy, Tomb of the Emperor (2/5)

Summer of the Flying Saucer
(Martin Duffy): Dan Colley, Lorcan Cranitch, John Keogh, Joanne Kernan, Hugh O’Connor, Patrick Bergin.
Running time: 98 minutes.

I’ve heard stories about the hoops screenwriters are made jump through for the Irish Film Board. What’s the fuss about? If a film as execrable as Summer of the Flying Saucer can get funding, then two Bonobos on ketamine with a broken typewriter can too. It is set in the late 1960s when hippy teen Lorcan (Dan Colley) returns to small town Ireland. His grumpy widowed dad scowls at his hippy son and the gossiping locals think he’s a communist. Meanwhile, a flying saucer is parked in a delapidated farmhouse. The alien space pilot looks like a Teutonic Nick Cave; the other is a pleasant young woman (Joanne Kernan). They wear strange clothes, steal tin and the locals don’t want their sort around here – an embarrassing metaphor for Travellers. Hugh O’Conor, who has been in every Irish film you should avoid, plays a sclerotic priest. Damn it if he isn’t consistent. Martin Duffy directs like it was 1980s children’s TV: naff aliens; ridiculous costumes; appallingly twee drama, clunky and clichéd. His staging of the players is amateur theatre. It reminded me of Ed Wood, though he never made films for kids and was famously chased out of the cinema by angry financiers. This apparently got around €1m from the film board. How many young filmmakers are being starved of a voice because of decisions like this?

Before the Rains
Santosh Silvan):
Linus Roache, Rahul Bose, Nandita Das, Jennifer Ehle.
Running time: 98 minutes.

British spice merchant Henry (Linus Roache) is having a dangerous affair with his married Indian housemaid Sajani (Nandita Das). His engineer, the Indian intellectual TK (Rahul Bose), looks askance in silence. He knows the villagers will hang her if she is caught. Henry plans to build a spice road before the monsoon, but the Raj is beginning to collapse; the Indians are turning against the imperial Brits. The pomp and period tells you this is Merchant Ivory, though director Santosh Silvan approaches the theme of betrayal with classical simplicity. Silvan, also a cinematographer, conjures lush topography and sensuality. But he coaxes too some wonderfully nuanced performances from his excellent players. Henry’s wife (Jennifer Ehle) makes a late entrance and her face, a slow-motion car crash of realisation, almost steals the show. Silvan is aided by a fine script from Cathy Rabin: though the dramatic momentum is too easy to predict, the film’s moral complexity captures precisely the political and emotional tenor of the period.

Elite Squad
(José Padilha):
Wagner Moura, André Ramiro, Caio Junqueira, Milhem Cortaz, Fernando Machado.
Running time: 114 minutes.

José Padilha’s Elite Squad arrives here freighted with controversy. It’s a slick, potent Brazilian cop movie and Padilha is a socially conscious filmmaker. His target? Cop corruption, and more pointedly, the vigilante violence of Rio de Janeiro’s special ops squad BOPE. But he makes a fundamental error of judgment: the film glorifies the violence into fascistic propaganda, a training manual for SS-wannabe bootboys, instead of making a case for change. Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura) is a BOPE lieutenant cracking under the strain. He needs out. First he must groom two rookies. The BOPE shoot first, ask questions later. They raid silently at night, like the SAS. They interrogate by pummel and suffocation. Their training regime is brutal but rendered macho-sexy. They are accountable to no one and this the film justifies BOPE’s vigilantism. The story allows for Nascimento to get out, but not by rejecting violence. His character is seen not only to condone but promote it. This is dangerous: films encourage you to develop sympathy for their characters. In the ultimate scene, I found myself egging on an individual who is told by Nascimento to shoot a gangster in the face with a shotgun so he cannot have an open coffin. The moment is electric; I wanted him to do it until I yanked hold of my senses. What kind of film makes anyone wish for such a thing?

The Mummy: Tomb of the Emperor
(Rob Cohen):
Brendan Fraser, Jet Li, Mario Bello, John Hannah, Michelle Yeoh, Luke Ford.
Running time: 111 minutes.

Brendan Fraser’s career ended seemingly thousands of years ago. His embalmed physique plods through this silly adventure franchise. A newly resurrected 2000-year-old Chinese emperor (Jet Li) and his terracotta army is set to take over the world. It’s like the last time I read the Economist only with marginally less sense. (Americans really are terrified of the new China). It’s up to explorer Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser), his wife (Mario Bello) and son (Luke Ford) to stop him. Cue a treadmill of explosions, giant diamonds, supernatural powers, avalanches, a drunken Irish pilot (Liam Cunningham), yetis, Shangri La, and a yak yakking into an airplane sick bag. The glossy special effects well to disguise the film’s showy origins. Hollywood has been churning out B-movies like this forever: critics maul them, parents groan-giggle and children take them to heart.

Review: The Fox And The Child (2/5); Make It Happen (1/5)

The Fox and the Child
(Luc Jacquet):
Bertille Noël-Bruneau, Kate Winslet. Running time: 92 minutes.

From the Antarctic to nature on your doorstep, French filmmaker Luc Jacquet follows up March of the Penguins with this fusion of nature documentary and children’s fairy-tale. Half of it works. It’s the story of a 10-year-old French girl, with cute freckles and two red buns in her hair, who doggedly pursues the friendship of a vixen through the seasons. The natural footage is astonishing: filmed in the French region of the Retord Plateau near Ain in southeast France, it has a painterly Alpine beauty. Hedgehogs, otters, ravens, even a wild bear makes a cameo. Less wondrous is the way Jacquet insists on gluing a narrative onto his footage. He uses creative editing to fashion a story in which the girl learns that, with nature, you can look adoringly, but cannot touch. But it’s syrupy and stretched out and I started to nod off; Kate Winslet’s occasional narration could do with some perk. Ninety-two minutes was too long for me. How will young children manage?

Make It Happen
(Darren Grant):
Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Tessa Thompson, Julissa Bermudez, Riley Smith.
Running time: 90 minutes.

Lauryn (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a small-town dancer, hopes to earn a shot at the big time in the Chicago School of Dance. Her mother, a dancer, is dead; her brother, a mechanic, is dead against it: what an impracticable dream! She should work instead at his garage. But she does the audition anyway, fails, lies to her brother and ends up working in an upmarket bordello in the big, dangerous city. Eventually, her long legs scissor the opposition, but they fail to cut the cliches out of this dance-by-numbers routine. Grindhouse star Winstead has a bright, young face. But she wears her hood up a lot, persumably to disguise the body doubles. Lauryn might have been a character worth shouting for. But what’s the point? Her second audition has the certainty of gravity. Director Darren Grant doesn’t worry about such shallow predictability and invests his energies into the glitzy dance numbers.

Review: Man On Wire (4/5)

Man on Wire
(James Marsh):
Philippe Petit, Jean-Louis Blondeau, Annie Allix, David Foreman.
Running time: 94 minutes

Among all the dumbfounding images to be found in James Marsh’s dizzying documentary Man on Wire, the kind of images that cause your legs to make off for the bar to down a steadying stiff drink, there is one that knocked me out: it is a black and white photo taken on 7 August 1974 of Manhattan’s former World Trade Center. The photo is framed by the vertical stripes of the Twin Towers and at the top left, captured in silhouette, is a jetliner that, by a trick of perspective, seems a split second from collision. Move your gaze to the centre of that photograph, and you’ll see an ant-like figure walking on what looks like fine thread. It could be a scratch on the negative. This is Philippe Petit, then a fearless unknown, walking a tightrope between the two towers, a quarter of a mile above the ground. It is a haunting yet prescient photo: it captures not just the angelic majesty of Petit’s daredevilry, but the past too colliding with the present.
Man on Wire, a documentary about this “the artistic crime of the century”, has nothing to do with 9/11. Not a whisper. Yet it has everything to do with it. And Petit’s achievement is today tinctured with the toxins of recent memory. (On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, the New Yorker magazine ran a cartoon of Petit’s highwire act with the towers erased out). When the Twin Towers were built in 1970, violence was rupturing the Middle East, but America’s virtue was barely scuffed. It was the tallest skyscraper in the world of its time, and the inaugural speech said “that it will truly promote not only harmony between the states but harmony and communication between the nations of the world”. Tourists flocked to see it. Among them was Philippe Pettit, a tightrope walker who had already been arrested twice for walking the clouds of Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral and Sydney’s Harbour Bridge. (His best trick? To lie down on the wire as if having a snooze). Petit, sitting in a dentist’s waiting room, saw a sketch of the then unbuilt towers in a magazine and was hooked. The irony is he had to approach the deed with the subterfuge of a terrorist. He spent months surveying the building, assembling a team to infiltrate the towers. Fake IDs had to be made, a worker inside had to be groomed, and photos had to be taken on the roofs so Petit could figure how to set up the complex rope mechanism. He hired a helicopter, posed as a journalist to get inside and even slipped past security to have a look at the top. They took a lot of photos: one of them shows Petit blithely doing a handstand on the very edge of the tower. What kind of man is he? He is certainly an exuberant storyteller. There is a moment he refers to himself as “a poet conquering beautiful stages” and you know immediately he must be French – who else to reimagine circus as philosophy? And as for his brilliance, on that August morning he walked across eight times; did a salute while balancing on a knee, had a conversation with a seagull, and only came in when the police threatened to scoop him up with a helicopter. Marsh assembles Petit’s accomplices and today they are all bald and grey. That is except for Petit, whose sagging face is framed by bushy carrot hair. I suppose if you have stared down death from on top of the world on a steel rope, regular life doesn’t get to you. Though it must be said the event took its toll: his childhood friendship with Jean-Louis Blondeau, a key figure in the plan, fell apart, and Petit’s newfound celebrity ruined his long-term relationship Annie Allix. The tale unspools like a heist movie – the assembling of a team, the execution of a plan. But director James Marsh (he directed Gael Garcia Bernal in The King) chops back and forth with backstory, securing old footage of Petit, training in his back garden and poignant news reels of the building of the Twin Towers, its foundations looking uncannily like Ground Zero. Yet the film avoids sentimentality. Man on Wire celebrates our will to dream. Like last year’s In The Shadow of the Moon, it captures that other side of human madness with staggering images to match: how beauty comes of towering achievement, whether that be the building of Babel or the walking across it on a tightrope. Man on Wire helps reclaim the wonder of those two acts from the shadow of 2001’s terror. See it in the cinema, and try not to fall dizzy out of your seat.

Review: Married Life (3/5); Cass (1/5)

Married Life
Ira Sachs):
Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, Pierce Brosnan, Rachel McAdams.
Running time: 90 minutes.

Whatever it is about Rachel McAdams’ Kay – those doe eyes, that bottle-blonde hair – it isn’t her personality that draws Chris Cooper’s fiftysomething Harry into her bed, and into a plot to murder his wife. McAdams barely treads water alongside pros such as Cooper and Patricia Clarkson. Though Pierce Brosnan ups his game, ironing out those lethargic creases. He adopts as narrator the plum snidery of George Sanders. His Richard is best pal to Harry. He too wants Kay as his mistress and gets on just fine with Harry’s wife Pat (Patricia Clarkson), whom Harry would prefer to kill than break her heart. But while Harry plots, he’s in for a wake-up call. Ira Sachs previously directed Forty Shades of Blue and there too you could detect a sensibility that allows for more sophistication in the battleground between men and women. When it comes to sexual desire, his females have equal billing, even though his male characters can’t quite see this until too late. Clarkson here is majestic and understated. The scenes are simple and organic; the cast allowed time to bloom. Some neat twists turn into suspense, and the bright 1950s melodrama belies the murky shadows of noir. But it doesn’t hold. Sachs’ carefully tended cynicism about married life gives way to a soppy sentimentalism, a rolling thunder cloud that dissolves before the clap of thunder.

Cass
(Jon S Baird):
Nonso Anozie, Nathalie Press, Leo Gregory, Gavin Brocker.
Running time: 108 minutes

This film deserves a beating. It is the true story of football hooliganism, but more particularly a chap called Cass Pennant. He’s a black Jamaican baby adopted by a white woman in east London. He’s bullied and ridiculed, so he grows up angry, see? This anger needs an outlet, so the towering black man (played awkwardly by Nonso Anozie) heads up the famous white-skinned ICF, notorious thugs who did battle on and off the terraces in the name of West Ham FC. Most famous moment: baseball-batting the inhabitants of a Newcastle working man’s club. Thatcher declares hooligans will go to jail, and Cass is the first in the clanger. He becomes a changed man only for his past to come a-haunting. The story is stuffed with over-earnest leaf-turning flimflam. And though it appears to be a true story, Cass appears to have led a life that more closely resembles Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. Joe Pesci’s infamous “Funny, how?” scene is delivered here almost word for word. Legend has it Orson Welles watched John Ford’s Stagecoach 40 times before he made Citizen Kane. Judging by the thoroughly ham-fisted staging of this drama, not to mention his inability to direct actors, Jon S Baird appears to have fallen asleep halfway through his first viewing of Goodfellas and somnambulated his way through the entire shoot.

Review: The X-Files: I Want To Believe (1/5)

The X-Files: I Want To Believe
(Chris Carter):
David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Billy Connolly.
Running time: 105 minutes


I have never seen a person zap a defibrillator into the chest of an exhumed 10-year-old corpse. Though I guess the limp response would look similar to this X-Files rehash. Chris Carter, who created the Emmy award-winning TV series, takes over from Rob Bowman to direct, but he has no energy, no screen electricity, nor any ideas. This should have been left alone in the basement to gather dust with all those unsolved case files. David Duchovny’s Mulder and Gillian Anderson’s Scully are now a retired couple: he’s grown a beard, is in hiding from the FBI and prowls around the house looking at old photos during the day. Meanwhile, Scully goes to work as a consultant-cum-surgeon-cum-cutting-edge scientist at an old-school faith-run hospital. This is the pretext for some flimsy debate involving faith versus skepticism, followed by some thoroughly unjustified and unsettlingly weird, suggestive nastiness in the hospital chief (Adam Godley), who happens to be a priest. Is he eyeing up the young sick child because he is a paedophile or just because he wants to close his case? We’ll never know. Perhaps Carter has something to get off his chest. Billy Connolly turns up as Father Joseph, a paedophile priest turned psychic who divines clues about a woman FBI agent who goes missing in the snow. When he goes into a trance, his eyes start to drip stigmatic blood. I know the feeling. Mulder is enticed out of hiding to investigate. Are Father Joseph’s psychic powers real or fake? The trail leads to a set of baddies that would send decent Republican folk into foaming apoplexy. They are, wait for it, a pair of married, gay Russian men. Holy moly! Though we are never shown, it should be presumed they have a secret cabinet out back full of Nazi memorabilia and a kiddy dungeon downstairs. Their schtick is in illegal transplants and they work in an operating theatre at night in the middle of nowhere where the lights are on dimmer. Can they not afford the electricity? The procedural that follows drains the blood. Gone is the series’ former sci-fi charm to cash in on Hollywood’s obsession with torture porn. The X-Files has turned sadistic. I presume this is because its former audience is now at home scrimping for mortgages. Can it find a teenage audience groomed on violent horror? At no point does it stop being a stretched TV episode and become a feature film. Carter builds into events an anaemic subplot about the relationship tension between Mulder and Scully. They talk lethargically at one another, in the way couples who lost the heat long ago learn to do. The best kind of advice for that kind of relationship is to get out of it as soon as you can. I could say the same about this artless junk.