Now Available in DVD "The Queen"

Helen Mirren richly deserved her Academy Award for best actress and writer Peter Morgan, as one of three credited screenwriters for The Last King of Scotland, pulled off a regal Oscar double last month.

And if he hadn't already amazed us with an identikit Tony Blair in Morgan's TV breakthrough The Deal, Michael Sheen would surely have had more plaudits for his PM here: the meetings between eager smiley prime minister and frosty monarch are a comic delight and, like much of the film, seem all too credible.
DVD
The Queen


**** (Cert 12)

Rob Mackie
Friday March 9, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Helen Mirren richly deserved her Academy Award for best actress and writer Peter Morgan, as one of three credited screenwriters for The Last King of Scotland, pulled off a regal Oscar double last month.

And if he hadn't already amazed us with an identikit Tony Blair in Morgan's TV breakthrough The Deal, Michael Sheen would surely have had more plaudits for his PM here: the meetings between eager smiley prime minister and frosty monarch are a comic delight and, like much of the film, seem all too credible.


Stephen Frears' movie is skilful too in providing something for everyone - monarchists can get behind the Queen's admirable restraint as the tabloids bayed, while nests of republicans who prefer The Royle Family can enjoy a view of a starchy, out-of-touch bunch in a stagnant pond of absurd protocol. Yet it never descends to caricature.

Apart from a couthed up Alastair Campbell (a necessity or the 12 certificate goes out the window), there is very little compromise on show. I wasn't too convinced by Alex Jennings' Prince Charles but Sylvia Syms' Queen Mother is immaculate, and the versatile James Cromwell - as near a spitting image Duke of Edinburgh as you could hope for - gets spot-on lines.

Frears, a man of many genres and master of quite a few, sums it up nicely in the extras: "It's an unsensational film, but making it is sensational." [source: The Guardian]

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Movie Review: "Blood Diamond"

Hollywood movies about Africa often contrive a balancing partnership of good black character and bad, or at least flawed, white character. The Last King of Scotland reversed this tradition but here normal service has been resumed.

Set in war-torn Sierra Leone in the late 1990s, Blood Diamond is about a noble fisherman, Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), and a cynical white arms dealer, Danny Archer, played by Leonardo DiCaprio with a Sith Iffrican iccent. Both men find themselves caught up in the dirty trade of blood diamonds: unofficial currency for buying arms. Archer wants to get his grubby mitts on a fabulously valuable "pink" diamond; Solomon knows where it is, but wants merely to be reunited with his son who has been abducted by Marxist rebels. Jennifer Connelly plays the beautiful journalist, the voice of conscience whose growing crush on the roguish Archer validates his place in the audience's heart. The whole thing is more Gerald Ratner than Harry Winston.

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Movie Review: "Freedom Writers"

To ma'am with love... Freedom Writers

Oh no, not another white, liberal do-gooder set on single-handedly helping the kids out of the ghetto. Set against the backdrop of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, this is almost a textbook classroom drama, inevitably "based on a remarkable true story" and backed up by a hip-hop score.

But like the surly students under Hilary Swank's tutelage, most viewers will find it hard to maintain their cynicism for long. By the end you'll probably want to open doors for her and call her "ma'am". More about Freedom Writers

Freedom Writers


*** (Cert 12A)

Steve Rose
Friday March 2, 2007
The Guardian

Freedom Writers
To ma'am with love... Freedom Writers


Oh no, not another white, liberal do-gooder set on single-handedly helping the kids out of the ghetto. Set against the backdrop of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, this is almost a textbook classroom drama, inevitably "based on a remarkable true story" and backed up by a hip-hop score.

But like the surly students under Hilary Swank's tutelage, most viewers will find it hard to maintain their cynicism for long. By the end you'll probably want to open doors for her and call her "ma'am".

Article continues
Swank plays Erin Gruwell, a teacher so optimistic she turns up to her first day at school in a sensible skirt-suit and pearls. Confronting her is a rabble of black, Latino and Asian "gangbangers" who don't respond well to her teaching methods. Of course, they'll end up reading The Diary of Anne Frank together instead of busting caps in each other's asses, but the movie works hard for its feelgood narrative.

Swank is winningly naive and goofy, and her attempts to get down with the kids are laughably clumsy. As an exercise in disarming, or manipulating, jaded audiences it's a success, but beyond that, what do films like this really achieve? Will viewers be inspired to go out and imitate Gruwell? Or are we just happy to feel that somebody else is trying to fix the problem?

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Movie Review: "Dreamgirls"

Flawed fantasy... Dreamgirls

More than two hours' worth of pure sucrose-enriched production values are socked over, pretty much without drawing breath, by this adapted Broadway musical about the Detroit scene from the soul 1960s to the disco 1970s, scripted and directed by Bill Condon. It is a fictionalised, streamlined version of the great personalities from this era, the chief of which is a quasi-Diana Ross figure played by Beyoncé Knowles. Eddie Murphy plays raunchy singer and ladies' man James "Thunder" Early, and Jamie Foxx is Curtis Taylor Jr, the fast-talking Cadillac-dealer-turned-promoter looking for ways to make the powerful black sound cross over to the white audience.There aren't actually that many songs here in the generic musical sense, and the characters don't start singing in this stylised way until some way into the movie, so the effect is a bit odd. The movie inevitably invites comparison with Jamie Foxx's breakthrough star vehicle Ray, about Ray Charles, with similar backstage shenanigans, tour-bus montages and hit-record excitements, though Foxx's character here is far less interesting and sympathetic. There is no single person or story to centre the drama around, and Murphy's performance, though widely liked and indeed now Oscar-nominated, is for my money flatly written with very little of the high comedy octane of which we know he is capable. [source: The Guardian]

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Movie Review: "Apocalypto"

Directed by Mel Gibson; starring Rudy Youngblood, Dalia Hernandez, Jonathan Brewer, Morris Birdyellowhead, Carlos Emilio Baez

Let me say at the start that, never having been a great Mel Gibson admirer, though liking a number of his movies, I think Apolcalypto is a remarkable achievement.

He directed the film and co-scripted it with Farhad Safinia, an Iranian-born, British-educated, first-time screenwriter, and it is performed by a cast of Native American and Mexican dancers, performance artists, singers, musicians, actors, circus performers and non-professionals (in one case, an 80-year-old Mayan-speaking village storyteller from the Yucatan).It was shot on difficult jungle locations and the photography by Gibson's fellow Australian Dean Semler is as fine as that which won him an Oscar for Dances with Wolves. Except for a couple of slightly over-extended sequences, the film grips from first to last. But before getting into the movie, a few words about how Gibson reached this point in his career.

On and off screen, he has often seemed a driven man at the end of his tether. He became a major star playing jocular, near-psychopathic action heroes in an Australian trilogy (the Mad Max movies) and an American quartet (the Lethal Weapon pictures), was a suitably neurotic Hamlet under Zeffirelli's direction and played a paranoid nutter in Conspiracy Theory. Running through his work is a vein of sadomasochism that gets broader as the films become increasingly personal. With it comes a loathing for oppressive rulers, usually identified as overly refined, cruelly civilised, callously imperialistic, as opposed to the simple, organic lives of the films' heroes (heroines do not figure significantly) who are close to nature, though no strangers to violence.

In his first really significant film, Gallipoli (1981), he played a young Australian athlete running towards his death in the ill-fated Dardanelles campaign of 1915-16. While there's some conventional Pommie-bashing, this was a patriotic saga directed by the romantic Peter Weir, and Gibson had yet to get the bit between his teeth. Were he to make Gallipoli now, the Brits would be presented (with some justice) as crass incompetents sending expendable colonials to be slaughtered.

He was to come into his own as an auteur with the second movie he directed, Braveheart (1995), set in the early 14th century and pitting the Scottish leader William Wallace against the effete, totalitarian English and concluding with the martyr-hero undergoing torture and an agonising death. This was followed by The Patriot (2000), a movie directed by the German Roland Emmerich but very much a Gibson project, in which he played an 18th-century American farmer aroused from neutrality to confront the relentlessly brutal, over-regimented British army in the War of Independence.

A fervent Catholic, he next moved back to the 1st century AD, bringing an unparalleled brutality to the scourging and crucifixion in The Passion of the Christ (2004) and presenting the Romans as sadistic imperialists. Shooting the film in Aramaic and Latin seemed foolhardy, as did Gibson's decision to put up most of the considerable budget himself. Surprisingly, the gamble paid off and he's now moved on to an even riskier venture with Apocalypto. It shares themes and a bold visual style with the earlier films, but is shot in a language - Mayan - that no moviegoer will understand. And the pretty obscure setting is 16th-century Central America on the very eve of the Spanish Conquistadors' arrival to raze a culture to the ground and superimpose their own on its ruins.

This carefully patterned film buries keys throughout its first half that will unlock narrative doors in the second, and works in a circular fashion through a series of parallel images. There are essentially six chapters. We first see a tribe hunting, killing and cutting up a large tapir in a dense jungle. They work together in a happy, jocular manner but their idyll is disrupted by the remnants of another tribe passing through their land to seek a new life deeper in the jungle after being dispossessed. We next see their village, a contented community where the principal character, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), lives with his pregnant wife and their little son. His father, the tribal elder, tells him of the need to confront and overcome fear. From the village storyteller he discovers the traditional symbolism surrounding his name.

As the innocent community sleeps, savage enemies attack the village. They kill most of the women and children and take the men in chains on an arduous journey across mountains and a fast-flowing river to be used as sacrificial slaves in the grand Mayan city. This supposed civilisation beheads its victims and throws them down the precipitous steps of pyramids to appease bloodthirsty gods. The priests work for arbitrary rulers with pampered wives and obese children. But during a sudden halt in the proceedings, the temporarily reprieved human sacrifices are given the chance to regain their liberty. If they can escape the spears and arrows raining down on them as they run across a sandy arena to the shelter of a cornfield, they're free. Jaguar Paw makes it, badly wounded. He has, however, angered the implacable leader of the Mayan's Myrmidons, and he's pursued whence he came. He's running not just to save his life but to rescue his wife and child hiding in a pit.

A magnificent chase ensues, a vivid, violent, painful journey that occupies about a third of the movie and belongs in a cinematic tradition of such things. One thinks of Ernest Schoedsack's The Most Dangerous Game (at least thrice remade), where sadistic aristocrat Leslie Banks hunts human victims lured to his island in the Malayan archipelago; Cornel Wilde in The Naked Prey, given the chance to run for his life by his native captors in early-19th-century Africa; Rod Steiger given a similar opportunity to escape from a tribe of hostile Sioux in Run of the Arrow; and, more briefly, the Nazis playing nasty games with French resistants facing a firing squad in The Army in the Shadows. But this one is not just a bid for survival. It's at once a visceral, moral and spiritual experience in which Jaguar Paw earns the name his tribe have bestowed on him. It concludes with a coda that combines the chilling and the beautiful, the tragic and the hopeful and which, without being either forced or spelled out, has a deep meaning for our own times.[source: The Guardian]

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Movie Review: "Becoming Jane"

Lovers of Jane Austen may wish to look away from the newspaper during the following sentence, or even pop into an adjoining room and strum out a lively air on the spinet. This speculative biopic of Jane Austen's love life features a scene in which the author's father, the Rev Mr Henry Austen, snuggles down to perform an act of oral love upon his lady wife, Jane's mother. Played by Julie Walters. With the cares of so many children, it was perhaps the only intimacy he considered prudent. This moment is enough to give you an attack of the vapours, as is the icky superciliousness of that pun in the title. There is a persistent undertow of tweeness that never entirely goes away: it is a picture whose mannerisms have been learned from other Austen adaptations - but learned assiduously and effectively.Anne "The Devil Wears Prada" Hathaway plays the lead, and although she's far too pretty in the role, isn't half bad, and the whole thing does not have the unremitting naffness of the recent Beatrix Potter extravaganza, starring the nose-wrinkling Renée Zellweger. The movie wistfully amplifies Austen's real-life flirting with the young Irish lawyer Tom Lefroy into a fully-fledged secret romance, complete with marriage plans. Lefroy is played by James McAvoy, coiffed and kitted out like a classic Regency buck - and in fact is made to look a little like the portraits of the young Prince Regent. McAvoy's Tom meets-cute with Jane: the arrogant metropolitan gadabout sneers at Jane's country ways and ingenuous prose, before falling for her. It's not a bad performance, and he has a nice rapport with Hathaway, whose accent is more or less in position. James Cromwell plays Jane's father as Prince Philip Lite.

The very idea of Jane Austen with a broken heart may be thought vulgar and pedantic by her modern readers, and the way the story pans out is not convincing. But it's amiably intended. Perhaps the time has come for Anne Hathaway to bow to destiny and play the wife of England's greatest poet.[The Guardian]

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Movie Review: "Ghost Rider"

Flaming Faust... Ghost Rider

At 43, Nicolas Cage is surely a little mature to be playing a super-hero from the Marvel Comics stable, but here he is, with a hairpiece and what look like digitally enhanced abs. His sheer deadpan goofiness makes this an enjoyable piece of bubblegum, though probably best for DVD.

By day, he is Johnny Blaze, a stunt bike rider with a weakness for Karen Carpenter's records; each of his death-defying feats is more absurdly dangerous than the last, culminating in an attempt to jump the length of a football field, over half a dozen Chinook helicopters. By night, he turns into flaming skeleton, the Ghost Rider, forced by Satan to ride around collecting souls for hell on his, erm, lethal chopper. It's all part of a terrible bargain he made with the Prince Of Darkness to cure his dad's cancer, and in idle moments when he's not in some sports arena flying through the air, or grabbing some sinner by the throat, Johnny broods over a copy of Goethe's Faust - and he's planning to use his dark powers against the Evil One.

It's ridiculous, likable, with some pleasing reminders of the Blade movies.

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Movie Review: "After the Wedding"

Not all jolly... After the Wedding (The Guardian)

Susanne Bier is a Danish director whose movies The One and Only, Open Hearts and Brothers have found an increasingly enthusiastic audience here: extremely well-acted, well-directed features comparable to classy British television drama.

Here is another elegant and well-turned piece of work, perhaps Bier's most persuasive movie yet. Mads Mikkelsen plays Jacob, an aid worker in Mumbai, fiercely committed to helping the needy children who adore him. He is a driven man who appears to have channelled various personal demons into his missionary zeal. Just when his charity programme looks as if it is going to go under for lack of funds, he is invited back to Copenhagen to meet a billionaire hotelier who hints that he might bankroll the whole project. This is the charming, dynamic Jorgen (Rolf Lassgard); he introduces Jacob to his beautiful wife Helene (Sidse Babett Knudsen), even invites him to his daughter's wedding, and appears to protract Jacob's visit with mysterious new afterthoughts and provisos.

A weird duel develops between the two men that has at its heart an awful personal secret. As with many of Bier's films, a certain suspension of disbelief is necessary: but she has a distinctive and engaging storytelling style.

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'They were heroes that history forgot'

A film about north Africans fighting the Nazis in the second world war has reopened old wounds about France's attitude to its former colony, Algeria. By Stuart Jeffries


The Guardian

A revelation... Days of Glory

In his preface to The Damned of the Earth, Frantz Fanon's 1961 book about the psychopathology of colonial rule, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of how Europeans made their subjects complicit in their imperial projects. "The European elite undertook to create an elite of natives; they selected adolescents, branded their foreheads with the principles of western culture, as with a red hot iron, and filled their mouths with big pasty words that stuck to their teeth."

This passage came to mind as I was watching the opening scene of Days of Glory, a new film tracing the drama of four north African men who fight to free France from German occupation during the second world war. A tribal chieftain walks through his village, rousting young men from their homes and urging them to take up arms for France. It is 1943, and De Gaulle's Free French are attempting raise an army of young men from its colonial subjects to fight for la mère patrie - a "homeland" few have ever seen. The recruiter shouts that his villagers must help throw the Nazis out of France: "We must wash the French flag in our blood."

What's so strange now is that such an invitation to sacrifice can have been at all seductive. Fight for France? Shed blood for the grisly colonial power that occupied Algeria in 1830 and plundered it mercilessly? That Algerians should be so in thrall to the French who, shortly after the 1848 revolution, made their country an integral part of France (consisting of three départements), says a great deal about the number that the colonisers did on the minds of the colonised.

With the benefit of 64 years of hindsight, the tribal leader's call to arms sounds even more ludicrous. Fight for a France that would, during Algeria's war of independence from 1954 to 1962, torture Arabs? Fight for a France that would shabbily abandon those Algerians who sided with the colonial power in that war of independence - leaving them open to murderous reprisals or shadowy lives of appalling penury?

I put my misgivings to Days of Glory's director Rachid Bouchareb. "I can quite understand that you might think this is strange," says Bouchareb, who was born in France to Algerian parents. "But what perhaps you don't know is that many Maghrebins [people from the former French colonies of Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria] had fought for France before and felt an ancestral commitment to France - their fathers and grandfathers had already fallen for France in the Franco-Prussian war and the first world war."

Bouchareb follows the story of these men, from their recruitment in the Maghreb sun to their last stand in snowy Alsace against a German battalion. "These were heroes that history has forgotten," he says. "My purpose was to make them live again in the memories of those who have forgotten and make those who never knew learn something of their heritage."

Hundreds of thousands of men from the French colonies fought to free France from Nazism. Among them was Fanon, who was wounded in 1944 at Colmar and received the Croix de Guerre. When the Nazis were defeated and Allied forces crossed the Rhine into Germany, all non-white soldiers from Fanon's regiment were sent to Toulon instead. Such was the fate of the colonial subjects who fought for imperial France - to be airbrushed out of the myth that it was the sons of France who finally rose up against the Nazis. Days of Glory reminds us that it wasn't like that.

The film has been a revelation in France. It trounced the Hollywood blockbuster The Devil Wears Prada at the box office in its opening last September. More importantly, it added to the already vexed debate on what it is to be French."Arabs come up to me in the street and say thank you," says Bernard Blancan, who plays Sergeant Martinez, the ostensibly white leader of the battalion of Maghrebins. "So do the bobos [fashionable urban bohemians] - they always come up and say, 'Bravo.' It's become kind of politically correct to do so. Even trendy. I'm not sure how deep their sentiments go."

Days of Glory even catalysed President Jacques Chirac to attend the Paris premiere. Before doing so, he changed the law to bring foreign combatant pensions into line with what French veterans are paid. That addressed an injustice Bouchareb exposed in the epilogue to his film: at the start of the 1960s, the French government decided to freeze, at their 1959 levels, the pensions given to foreign fighters.

Days of Glory is one of a wave of films dealing with France's rule of Algeria. It is about time. French cinema has had too little to say about Algeria's relationship with France, even though other parts of Gallic culture - from Camus to Zizou - have been suffused with it for decades. "French cinema is often accused, and not without reason, for ignoring recent French history, particularly its more problematic aspects," says Jean-Michel Frodon of the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma.

One reason for that, no doubt, is what Fanon called the narcissism of the west: it was always more interested in its self-image rather than taking an interest in the rest of the world. Even Camus' L'Etranger is part of this narcissism: ultimately, the novel isn't about Algeria, but about a Frenchman who fails to cry at his mother's funeral and must be punished for that crime. The fact that he stabbed an Arab to death is more or less incidental.

Indeed, such was French narcissism that, in 2005, an ill-advised law was passed demanding that lycée teachers instruct students in the "benefits of colonialisation". Teachers were to "acknowledge and recognise in particular the positive role of the French presence abroad, especially in north Africa". To their credit, many French people saw this as a denial of their country's racist crimes. And the president of Algeria, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, said the law "approached mental blindness, negationism and revisionism". The following year Chirac faced down members of his own UMP party and a growing pro-colonial lobby to ensure that the law was repealed.

It is in this context that the wave of films about Algeria has hit France. Another of them, Mon Colonel, deals with the torture by French soldiers of presumed supporters of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). Its makers suggest the law on the benefits of colonialisation, as well as a statue recently erected to the OAS (the Secret Army Organisation), are evidence "that our country continues to be tainted, haunted and maimed by that era".

"There has been an almost total absence in our cinemas of films about the Algerian war of independence seen as personal tragedies," says Costa-Gavras, writer of Mon Colonel. But his film does just that, dramatising how a young lieutenant becomes a torturer and how his colonel, a former resistance fighter, justifies what he and his men do to Algerians.

This has been a political hot potato in France and Algeria for decades, and it has long been known that torture was practised on both sides of the conflict. In the 1960s, all French soldiers who served in Algeria were amnestied - which meant that they could not be tried for war crimes.

In 2001, a French general, Paul Aussaresses, wrote a book exposing the extent to which the French army used such tactics. The following year, he was fined in a French court: not for admitting what he did, but for expressing insufficient remorse for his actions. The prosecutor argued that the general's writing style reflected a "cold tone, lacking any hindsight and any humanity". Aussaresses said during the trial that he would "do it all again if necessary", but the acts gave him "no pleasure". Torture is also dealt with in the third of the films about Algeria, La Trahison (The Betrayal), about the tensions in a mixed unit of Algerian Arab and French soldiers in 1960.

These films are welcome since, until now, the only significant film about the Franco-Algerian conflict was made by an Italian. The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 masterpiece, dramatised the FLN's terror tactics against colonial rule, and how the French government used equally atrocious means in response. In 2003, the New York Times reported that The Battle of Algiers was being studied at the Pentagon, where audiences were "urged to consider and discuss the implicit issues at the core of the film - the problematic but alluring efficacy of brutal and repressive means in fighting clandestine terrorists in places like Algeria and Iraq".

Sartre wrote of the military aspect of colonialism: "We must face this spectacle, which is the striptease of our humanity. Here everything is naked, and hardly beautiful: nothing but a lying ideology that is supposed to give exquisite justification for pillage." That striptease is set to continue. Bouchareb's next film is about the Sétif massacre in Algeria in 1945. This was another shameful moment for the French. Initially sparked by a clash between anti-colonial Algerian protesters and French soldiers on May 8, 1945 (the same day Germany surrendered in the second world war), it ended with between 20,000 and 45,000 people dying at the hands of the French military.

Why, I ask Bouchareb, is he raking over the past? He says there is a continuity between how France has failed to address the wrongs of its colonial past and the alienation of many children of immigrants from former colonies. "Because the film is pertinent to the question of what kind of France we imagine we're living in. Is it one that is sensitive to the wrongs visited on the ancestors of its immigrants, one that is prepared to admit the mistakes of the past and make the sons and daughters of those immigrants feel at home?"

· La Trahison is at the Institut Français, London SW1, on March 13. Mon Colonel plays in the Human Rights Watch film festival on March 21 (hrw.org/iff/2007/london). Days of Glory is released on March 30. A special edition of Battle of Algiers is released on DVD in May

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The joy of a beautiful film poster

Poster boy: Will Oldham, star of Old Joy.

It's not often, nowadays, that a film poster will stop you in your tracks. Make you want to watch the movie without even knowing what it is about, who it's starring or whether the critics thought it worth its salt in stars. The last time it happened was standing in a bus stop in Sydney, when I turned to see the slippered feet and hairy legs of a dressing gown-clad man dangling below the simple, white type of Lost In Translation. I immediately knew I wanted to watch that film before even making a solid connection with Bill Murray and Sofia Coppola and Scarlett Johansson.
Browsing the Solace in Cinema blog today, that very thing happened again when I came across their post on the Old Joy film poster. I was about to tell you that the film stars Will Oldham aka anti-folk artist Bonnie Prince Billy. But forget that. Look at the poster, drink in its clear colour and subtle design, and let that motivate you.

I agree with Ryan Gilbey that the art of poster collecting is rather futile now, with the brilliant designs of days gone by - from Apocalypse Now to Taxi Driver - reduced to little more than a fight for space between garish images and hyperbolic straplines. As Solace In Cinema says, the Old Joy poster makes a refreshing change from the floating heads and terrible fonts you come to expect from today's designers. And maybe its Coppola's photographic film shot that makes the Lost In Translation poster so tantalising, rather than the design itself. But are these just rare flashes of creativity, or are there other film posters from recent releases that have blinded you to all else but the art?

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