'Beyond The Sea'

Beyond The Sea (dir: Kevin Spacey, 2004, USA/Ger/UK)

It's an odd experience to see Kevin Spacey dancing. It's not something we've seen him do too much over the years - we never saw Lester Burnham do the polka or Keyser Soze swept away in the midst of a cha-cha, so the big dance numbers here take a bit of getting used to.

Spacey stars as legendary crooner Bobby Darin as well as directing this, his dream project as a huge Darin fanboy. The performance is good although it's difficult to tell whether he has Darin down, so little footage of the 50s superstar have I seen. Spacey though does much of the singing and has a pretty good voice - the music itself is fantastic, as you would expect, and pulls the movie through its baggier moments.

Despite some potentially dark events in Darin's life (all touched on here to varying degrees) this is an unashamedly large and lavish production. Don't let the thought of 45-year-old Spacey as a twenty-something Darin put you off - he holds his own during the big numbers more often than not, even compared to the pro dancers that surround him. It doesn't matter whether you are a Bobby Darin afficionado or essentially clueless about his life and career (as I was), this film will enlighten and entertain at the same time. Good fun.

3 Stars ***

'Stage Beauty'

Stage Beauty (dir: Richard Eyre, 2004, UK/Ger/USA)

So, here we go - the first movie posting on the blog. Hoorah and, more to the point, whoopee! If only I knew how to make the page look better and more fun to use. I suppose it will all come in time.

'Stage Beauty' was a movie barely seen by anybody on release and it's difficult to work out why. I assume the answer is something as boring as slovenly marketing or a limited release but whatever the reason it's a shame and a half. This is a wonderfully-acted period piece that deserves a wider audience than it has received in the four years since it first graced our screens (or 'screen', most probably).

And so, a vague set-up: it's the swinging 1660's and Ned Kynaston (a particularly lithe Billy Crudup) is one of the shining lights of the London stage. It is illegal for women to take to the boards and thus all female roles are played by men, Ned among them. His assistant Maria (Claire Danes) gazes on from the wings with unrequited adoration for Ned and a growing passion for acting itself, so much so that she starts to sneak away at the end of his shows to play Desdemona in 'Othello' at a local tavern. Ooooh slapped wrist. Anyway through various plot machinations both Ned and Maria are invited to 'The Palace', homestead of King Charles II, and after much playful dinner-time banter the king decides that enough is enough and that women should be able to play women on the stages of England.

Crudup's performance as a riches-to-rags Kynaston (a real cross-gender performer of 17th Century London) is magnificently layered - Ned's acerbic wit and confident swagger in the first half of the film is very swiftly replaced by dejected bitterness as the film unfolds. The grudging realisation of his being surplus to requirements is perfectly played here and it is a bit of a shame that the film itself does not match up to the central performance. Danes is solid and there is definite chemistry between the two leads but the movie is slightly baggy in the middle, lacking clarity on what exactly it wants to be. The direction is not as sharp as, say, 'Shakespeare In Love' - a film that 'Beauty' seemingly aspires to - and it is not quite clear whether the film-makers wanted to produce a comedy, a drama, a period romance or a serious commentary on what it was like for these actors once they were no longer needed. It does all of these things but none of them completely successfully.

Supporting performances by stalwarts of the British stage and screen such as Richard Griffiths, the fantastic Tom Wilkinson and a rather foppish Rupert Everett as Charles II are good as you would expect despite a sometimes schizophrenic screenplay which offsets clunky exposition with biting one-liners with frightening regularity.

The acting though is strong enough to shrug off the bugbears of script and direction and pull the film through to a rousing finale. The whole exercise does make one wonder why Crudup and Danes make so few movies when they are so much more talented than the average Hollywood actor - the hope is that it is through their own choice and not through lack of offers. That would be just criminal. Great acting in a film that should have been better.

3 Stars ***

Chocolate - Thai Kung-foo

It's Bruce Lee in the body of a teenage girl. I don't like gangster films in principle. I don't see how you can have good and bad gangsters, but here we are. A forbidden love (or is it jealously, cuckoldry?); exile with a mentally disturbed love child; a past forgotten and then stumbled on by the children years later. Ok. But the girl is special, super reflexes, learns kung foo from watching movies. Hmm. Eventually she fights, unwittingly restarting her parents old turf war, and that's were the Jackie Chan style comedy begins.

The fight scenes are superb and get bigger and bigger until the climax of the film. That's entertainment y'all.



Posted with LifeCast

Burn After Reading

I'm a bit late to this party I think, but I went over to the Greenwich Picture House (with a friend) to see Burn After Reading. All I knew was that it was a Coen Brothers flick with Clooney and (an older looking) Brad Pitt in it, and that it was about an attempt to find a missing disc. Oh if only it were that simple!

It starts off by introducing the main charectors, except they are not, they appear later and appear totally unrelated. This is not a film for either the casual observer, the unattentive or the tired. It weaves the two groups of people together deliciously or should that be ridiculously?

I am not sure. The premise is beliveable, blackmail to extort money for plastic surgery, but how they go about it is so mind-boggling. It is so "Washington" it verges on alienating. But I think it is really a study in stress induced temporary insanity. All the charecters are stressed and all express it in their own way, George Clooney's charector in particular. The dirty old boy. And then you realise that the film is remarkably and violently explicit. Real murder scenes. Golly what a film.

Posted with LifeCast