Jamie passion and passionfruit!

Sondheim’s musical turned into film and a dark one at that, by Tim Burton.  Remarkably effective and one of Burton’s best films matching and surpassing Mamma Mia for getting non-singing actors to sustain a musical. There is plenty of gore and revenge but the tightness of the music and the flow of wonderful Burtonesque images make it captivating.  Johnny Depp is once again most effective in the lead role and Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs Lovett gives an excellent performance. Alan Rickman, Sacha Baron Cohen and Timothy Spall are among a fine supporting cast and finally Dante Ferretti’s sets and design top off the work.

For the violence, maybe I could not say that this is my favourite type of film but there is no doubting that the final product here is a superior film musical and one of the best movies of the year.

****+

Enjoyable remake of the TV series which is not especially momentous but captures a nice vein of humour and is ably led by Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway.

***

A nice small Argentine film about a 23 year-old lost in the big city in the middle of the financial crisis, unable to get to home base with his girlfriend and about to lose his best friend who is emigrating to Italy.  This film by Nicolás Tannchen is no classic but he does do several things well.  He gets inside the head of typical Argentines and recreates their mindset of having the dreams but always being impeded from getting them by some ‘outside’ force.  Even his female characters which have less to do are believable. Pablo G. Pérez does a good job in the lead role and Marco de Bellis in a supporting roles livens up the screen when he is on.  Pleasant viewing.

***

A writer that I discovered a year or so ago, whose first novel Lost City Radio has just won a major literary prize in the US.  Prior to that he had published some excellent stories and was one of Granta’s young American writers of the decade. Alarcon is Peruvian by birth but has been brought up in the US where he currently resides.  He writes in English mainly and has spent time back in Lima to get research and prepare his writing.  Although his work tends to take place in anonymous cities and countries, the main inspiration is clearly the country of his family with maybe some Ecuador, Colombia and even –Argentina  thrown in.  Lost City Radio is about a country that is torn apart by civil war and features a late night radio announcer who as mother to the nation runs a show uniting people who have lost contact with family members or trying to track down lost souls.  The audience do not know that she has her own tragedy which she is trying to overcome, an event which returns to the surface when a young boy comes from the countryside and is dumped on her doorstep in a manner of speaking.  Alarcon creates a wonderful tense and weary atmosphere in the book, his characters are totally credible and sustains the narrative well in the way of a great storyteller.  I look forward to more of his slightly sad and melancholic work – he gets right down to the core of life and spirit.

Old fashioned 7 year-old movie that is all of a BBC costume drama directed by Lina Wertmuller of all people but she too now in her 80’s and perhaps excused if she resorts to the tried and true.  Basically as a telemovie you can have few complaints about this – it delivers the melodrama it promises but it gives us no innovation, no real difference, even if it is a heavily feminine film and one that has political and economic contexts to contrast with the romantic side.  Sophia Loren in the lead role is exemplary in her ability to dominate a scene.  She is able matched by Giancarlo Gianini and in the supporting roles, Claudia Gerini shines as a sort of Greta Scacchi and Raoul Bova is sufficiently the matinee idol.  Watchable for a wet afternoon and a decent addition to the filmography of those involved but absolutely nothing special.

***

Entertaining and filled with lots of great Abba songs, this film is very much the stage musical put on celluloid.  The Greek island setting is almost as false for its excessive beauty as stage scenery, the characters are pretty one dimensional and it is left to Meryl Streep with her undoubted talent and the ever humorous Julie Walters to breathe a bit of spontaneity into the show.  It could have been a really creative and goose bump generating film as Priscilla, Queen of the Desert was.  It ends up a noble and technically very exact musical and is also entertaining but is very much, as I said, a musical with all that implies.

****

Not a film but the concert!  Sticky and Sweet tour!  Yes, I saw her in her last night in Buenos Aires.  She is amazing in her athleticism, and her energy.  The concepts, the technological side with videos to complement the music was excellent and something I had seldom seen the like of and not to this extent.  The crowd on the field was ecstatic, perhaps a little more up and down were those like me upstairs in River stadium what with the threat of a thunderstorm too!

The music itself was perhaps the weakest part in that people obviously wanted more of her greatest hits and less of the latest album which has some good numbers and other forgettable ones. The remakes of some songs were also weird like the Romanian gypsy hijacking of La Isla Bonita which is clearly now an island off Dubrovnik!

Personally I liked Devil wouldn’t recognise you and most of the rest I had reservations about.

Reservations too about the lack of empathy with the audience.  It is all a little too calculating and planned, right down to the Don’t cry for me Argentina implant and the lampshade engulfing her.  That warmth so common in Latin artists was what was missing and meant that a good experience failed to be great!

Am I being churlish? No.  I admire her a lot but I don’t necessarily like her!

French drama by noted director Claude Miller about the uncovering of a family secret to do with a group of Jews who were being sought by the Nazis in Paris.  The story is seen through the eyes of a son subsequently born to the family who realizes something is amiss and that there is hidden guilt waiting to be uncovered.  The direction is good and the photography is immaculate, Zbigniew Preisner pens some nice music and you cannot complain too much about a raft of top French actors.  So, what is the problem?  Well, for all the care taken, the film comes across as being all rather cold and superficial.  Cecile de France, Patrick Bruel and Julie Depardieu do what they can but it is not enough to rescue this story from a flat treatment.

***

Israeli gem about an Egyptian police band that gets lost in Israel and ends up making unexpected contact with ordinary Israeli’s in a depressing new town.  Yes, it is slow and nothing very dramatic happens but as a vignette of small gestures, this film is highly satisfying.  Ronit Elkabetz gives a delightful performance as the blowsy Israeli dreamer.  The film makes some good points in a quiet way and all in all is an uplifting little film.

****+

Watchable and then forgettable Argentine film which takes a kidnapping in the 2002 crisis and has it mirror another kidnapping in the same family during the dirty war with unspoken secrets and unpaid debts ready to come out into open. Although the situation could make for a great film, the real issues are avoided and the result is a sanitized and somewhat flat and unreal effort.  Jorge Marrale does his best. Pity, as it was based on real events and the script won awards.  Not for me.

**

Wong Kar-wai in his first American film produces a distinctly mixed bag.  The glossy neon images are there with interesting camera work, a nice soundtrack by Ry Cooder and some fair performances.  I wanted to like it more than I could as somehow the exercise in style was unable to make up for the lack of substance.  Norah Jones is a rather bland heroine, Jude Law has more charisma but it is Natalie Portman, David Strathairn and Rachel Weisz that hold the attention when on screen.  The intention is there but overall it is not up to his best.

***

There is absolutely nothing original in this film, neither in its story or production.  Nevertheless, it is an enjoyable 85 minutes thanks to its universal message which reminds us that there is life after losing a loved one and that you are never too old to go after your mission in life even if it upsets others.  Of course, what better setting than a Swiss village which seems trapped in a Jane Austen novel. We have the hypocritical village priest, the local businessman cum politician who thinks he can buy and bully his way to anything and the upright women of the parish repressing their true desires. 80 year-old widow Martha with some help from sassy friend Lisi shocks the village by returning to her first love of making erotic lingerie of the most tasteful kind.  She and a group of her friends discover liberation and the opprobrium of their fellow cowardly citizens.  Funny and an easy pleasure to watch

***

This Japanese film comes well hyped as a masterpiece, though it took 5 years to premiere here.  I am by no means sure of the masterpiece label and director Naomi Kawase clearly belongs to the Lucrecia Martel class of filmmakers who like to explore what is going on beneath the surface of people, in this case a family whose younger son disappeared some years previously and who have not fully comes to terms with it.  This is a film of impressions and experiences and we get to feel what it must be like to be in the shoes of these people.  Some of these scenes and camera work are very well done while other parts seem to drag as we have already got the point.  The camera as witness, often of reactions and side glances is a well used tool here. Overall, it is a good film with some excellent scenes but it doesn’t quite get up to the top of the tree for me this year

****

Bonneville

Another rather uncreative effort by someone who had the bright idea of a road trip featuring three middle-aged women and the ashes of the husband of one of them.  Supposedly they are Mormon too!  An excuse to see the salt flats of Utah, Las Vegas, etc, the whole story falls quickly flat and it is an effort to see it to the end.  Nothing novel here at all but you get to see Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates (who at least has fun) and Joan Allen.

**

El Brindis

Partly an excuse for a travelogue in Valparaiso, partly a look at the Jewish community there, it makes Daniel Burman look like a genius.  Only Argentine Pepe Soriano lifts this leaden, unimaginative and not exactly coherent story of lost contacts between Mexican jewesses and frustrated rabbis.

**

Then she found me

Happily, this directing debut by Helen Hunt has plenty to offer.  The story is unusual enough.  Hunt is a school teacher whose mother dies and then she discovers that her birth mother, a TV presenter is looking for her.  The mother is none other than Bette Midler (well restrained).  Add in weird ex-husband Matthew Broderick and new beau Colin Firth who has his own manias and you have a less than predictable and smart comedy about the messiness of life.

***