Jamie passion and passionfruit!

Each year the critics seem to say, best Woody Allen film in years and then by year’s end the said movie is described as one of his poorer efforts.  Let’s see what they make of this which is surely his most serious film in years.

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Maybe I am getting cynical but  there wasn’t much in this film to write home about.  It is simply a very competent British period piece with abundant humour, slick musical numbers and a stirring personal message which although very neatly done failed to move me.  I feel I’ve seen it all before.

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I have little to say about this pup!  Diane Lane, Christopher Plummer shine, Stockard Channing and Elizabeth Perkins are well cast and enjoyable.  John Cusack and Dermot Mulroney do what they can with rather flat parts.  The story is pretty obvious and lame and only a few scenes and lines really come alive.  Not bad, definitely not very good – we’ve seen it all before! 

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Kim Ki-duk is back again with another stylish and thought provoking film from Korea.  Apparently his best films haven´t been released here but this and his other (Spring, Summer, etc, etc) have plenty of merit and place him up among the more interesting film makers of the moment.  This film is about a young man with very particular principles who enters houses illegally when their owners are away, inhabits them for a day or two, stealing nothing but a bit of food from the fridge, often fixing things and doing the washing as well as wearing the owners clothes.  He also likes practising his golf swing with a number three iron, is adept at martial arts and is university educated.  Along the way he meets a battered wife in one of the houses and they begin a silent relationship in which she joins him on his odyssey from house to house.  This enrages her husband who attacks the young man and this eventually leads to being caught by the police and jail.  Unexpected things happen, and yet there is a coherency and message to this film which offers us a different urban story.  The photography is excellent, the acting is fine and the whole direction and care with which the details are revealed to us show a fine director at work.  Maybe it is not a great movie but 3-iron definitely provides novelty and themes for reflection.

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Two films that were stage plays have made it to the screen.  And both share the same problems of being shot in a restricted location and the need to lighten up the dialogue so we can cope with a feature length talk and little action.  Neither succeed fully although one manages it better than the other.  This is Tape by Richard Linklater – a three-hander with Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman and Robert Sean Leonard.  A strange meeting of old school mates in a dingy hotel room, a forced confession and a weird power game of lies and truth and dare as the three have different memories of a particular event ten years previously.

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I don’t know what to say about this film.  Yes, Philip Seymour Hoffmann gives a grand performance, worthy of the Oscar.  Yes, Catherine Keener is very much different and fine in a supporting role.  Yes, the other actors such as Clfton Collins Jnr and chris Cooper are fine.  Haunting music and a very well portrayed era (winter early 60’s USA).  The story is a dark one of how Truman Capote manipulates his way into the life of an assassin in return for learning all he needs to write a top novel which cements his reputation as the best in the land.  As a consequence, he realises that he has betrayed some of his own values and that he has got in rather too deep psychologically to be able to walk away without witnessing the end of the two killers and the pathetic end that meets them.  It is all too close to home considering that Truman has a similar early childhood.  And this is the beginning of the end for Capote as he starts to lose it to alcoholism and writer’s block.  It all becomes very dark!!!

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I saw this on Sunday afternoon and it was suitable snooze fare.  This ‘charming’ film from the Barcelona barrio of Hospitalet is a nice enough choral piece about the lives of the locals who have all got something to cover up (tapar) but it never really rises above precisely that – nice.  We have the old couple struggling to get by to pay the medical bills and with an uncertain future, we have the two local semi geeks working as stackers at the local supermarket and desperate to get laid and drunk and both, the sexist and difficult bar owner Lolo, whose wife walks out on him after years of maltreatment and his desperate efforts to save face, we have the single woman getting off on internet.  All easily recognisable types, all well portrayed here but all essentially of little interest to us.  There are no great revelations or learnings in the movie.  People adjust, life goes on and that`s about all there is to it.  So, we passed the time and I wouldn`t rate Corbacho and Cruz as the freshest new talents in Spanish cinema, as some suggest.  Rather it is Maria Galiana as the old lady who is the freshest thing in this, followed by a nice performance by Elvira Minguez as Raquel and the Chinese cook.  When I think of films like Te doy mis ojos – albeit a much more serious film, this falls a long way short.

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