QUANTUM OF SOLACE: left me neither shaken nor stirred

Daniel Craig's impressive debut as James Bond in 2006's "Casino Royale" made the veteran spy thriller franchise relevant again.
The phenomenal success of the Jason Bourne series with its emphasis on down and dirty violence had left the suave tuxedo-clad British Secret Service agent looking like something of a dinosaur.
But Craig's retooling of 007 as a muscular man of an action with an animalistic ability to fight and kill demonstrated that there was still room for more than one renegade agent in town.
It also set a very high bar for the follow-up and it's one that Craig and the guardians of the Bond name have failed to clear. Where "Casino Royale" rose to meet the challenge of the Bourne franchise QUANTUM OF SOLACE appears content at times to simply imitate it. There's no disputing that QOS is a superficially exciting and action packed viewing experience but it feels like a case of "anything Bourne can do we can do better or - at least - just as well."
To give just one example, early on in the story there's a death defying chase across rooftops and through apartments in the centuries old Italian town of Siena which brings to mind a very similar pursuit in Tangier in "The Bourne Ultimatum."
At the heart of both films is a man expertly trained to suppress his emotions, channelling his grief over the murder of his girlfriend into an unstoppable lust for revenge. Both are willing and able to kill in violent, messy cold blood to get to the men responsible but it's Jason Bourne who leaves a stronger impression on the viewer. Even if the Bourne franchise had never existed it's unlikely that this twenty second cinematic outing for Ian Fleming's creation will be remembered as one of the great Bond films. It's more "Licence to Kill" than "Goldfinger."
The problem is the story's lack of heart. Bond's career necessarily precludes a large number of close relationships but even those with "M" (Judi Dench) and CIA agent Felix Leiter (Geoffrey Rush) are presented as shallow and perfunctory. The closest that Bond comes to expressing real emotion is the moment when he cradles a dying friend whom he has just used as a human shield. The scene is so unexpected and out of place that it's almost shocking.
Otherwise there is a sense of QOS simply going through the motions of being a Bond film. Car chases? - check; a beautiful Bond girl? - check; M strips Bond of his licence to kill for renegade behaviour? - check; a villain with designs on world domination? - check, and so it goes on. All the essential elements are present and correct but they don't coalesce into a memorable whole.
Mathieu Almaric as Dominic Greene, the head of the shadowy, all pervasive Quantum Organisation is the sleeziest villain in Bond history. But his authority as chief representative of all that is evil in the world is rather undermined by the constant presence of his right-hand man who sports a haircut designed by his mum using nail scissors and a mixing bowl. And Ukrainian supermodel-turned-actress Olga Kurylenko as chief Bond girl Camille Montes is equally uncharismatic.
This wouldn't have been a problem in previous decades when all they were required to do was look alluring and jump in the sack with Bond, but it becomes a problem when they are expected to make an important contribution to the plot's forward motion, and make us care about them as a character.
QOS is definitely not a failure but neither is it distinguished or even particularly memorable. And no, not even after watching it twice, do I understand exactly what the title is supposed to mean!

THE PRISONER OF SECOND AVENUE: it's hot in the city

Jack Lemmon pretty much cornered the market when it came to playing twitchy, slightly neurotic, harassed office worker types struggling to maintain a grip on their sanity under the relentless onslaught of late 20th century city living.
Watching Lemmon's characters do battle with the impersonal, unmovable forces that defined and constrained his attempts to get ahead is always a pleasure, whether it's a comedy or a drama.
1975's THE PRISONER OF SECOND AVENUE is a minor entry in this oeuvre but a nonetheless enjoyable one, at least for the first 45 - 50 minutes.
Lemmon's Mel Edison is the titular prisoner, confined by choice to his less-than-desirable 14th floor apartment at the corner of 2nd Avenue and 88th Street in Manhattan, after he gets canned from the job he's held for 22 years.
Beset by overwhelming feelings of inadequacy and failure, noisily partying air hostesses in the next door apartment, a sweltering heatwave, and intermittent utilities, Mel understandably feels the walls closing in on him. His long suffering wife Edna's (Anne Bancroft) efforts to reach out to him only cause him to withdraw further.
Mel's headlong plunge into a minor mental breakdown is classic Lemmon aided in no small part by a sharp, funny script by Neil Simon based on his own play. But the smart lines and nuanced performances slowly give way to shouting and stock situations. Mel's disfunctional siblings and Edna's increasingly shrill shrieking are New York Jewish straight out of Central Casting. Don't get me wrong, I love New York Jewish humour when it's done right, but here it becomes blunt and obvious.
As a result the second half of the film lost my attention and it took an awful long time to get to the story's pretty lame conclusion.
I give it a B+ for intention but a C- for execution.

ACE IN THE HOLE: cynicism at its best

ACE IN THE HOLE is almost 60 years old but what it has to say about cynical exploitative "yellow" journalism is as relevant now as it was on its original release in 1951.
Kirk Douglas stars as Chuck Tatum, a newspaperman on the skids after falling out of the big time and desperate to get back up there again. Marooned and frustrated at the local paper in what was then the sleepy backwater of Albuquerque, New Mexico he's convinced that all he needs is one great - exclusive - story to have the big city editors banging on his door once more.
He discovers his meal ticket in the shape of Leo Minosa, a hapless working joe who's become trapped by a rockfall in an underground cave. Tatum deliberately delays Leo's rescue so he can exploit the story for his own benefit, and in the process turns the incident into a circus which spirals out of his control.
With the exception of "Paths of Glory" I've never been a big fan of Kirk Douglas. Too often, it's seemed to me he's played Kirk Douglas swamping the screen with his oversize personality. But here he is just fantastic not simply acting the part but being Tatum.
"I've met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my life but you're 20 minutes" Leo's embittered wife Lorraine (played by Jan Sterling) tells him; a line which not only perfectly encapsulates Tatum's take on life but also serves as an illustration of the quality of the script, co-written by Billy Wilder at his acerbic best.
Wilder makes it harder for us to dislike Tatum by depicting the "good" folk as either spinelessly soft-centred or too easily corrupted. Tatum's cynicism and selfishness poisons almost everyone who comes into contact with him; Wilder stylishly making the point that while Tatum is the instigator it's our (the public's) buy-in which permits him to succeed.
The script was rightly Oscar nominated. Alongside "Double Indemnity", "Sunset Boulevard" and "Some Like It Hot" this is a certified Wilder masterpiece What's a real surprise is that Douglas missed out on a nod in the Best Actor category - he certainly deserved it.

COMING SOON: Notes on a couple of trailers

Got my first look yesterday at the trailer for AMELIA, the new Amelia Earhart biopic. Toothy two time Oscar winner Hilary Swank stars as the famed aviatrix who vanished over the Pacific in 1937 while attempting to fly around the world.
From the brief clips of dialogue available it sounds like Swank is channelling Katharine Hepburn but without the head tremor.
If a trailer is intended to whet our appetite for a forthcoming attraction, prompting us to turn to our companion and whisper "I want to see this one" then the people responsible for the promo for COUPLES RETREAT should be fired.
Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau, Justin Bateman, Kristin Davis and Jean Reno star in what looks to be this summer's biggest cinematic turd - and it's not even a polished one.

PUBLIC ENEMIES: too close to the action

Fifteen minutes in and my eyeballs were screaming "pull back! for god's sake please pull back!!"
The majority of PUBLIC ENEMIES is shot in hi-def close up or extreme close up and the effect is relentless. My eyes got claustrophobic. If they had lungs they'd have been struggling to breathe.
Other than exposing Johnny Depp's every pore and blemish I'm still trying to figure out exactly what director Michael Mann's intention is in keeping the camera so very close to the action. On many occasions it is so close it's impossible to see the action properly. Possibly he wants to convey a sense of Depp's character, 30s American gangster John Dillinger, being hemmed in by fate and unable to escape his destiny. The flaw in that theory is that Dillinger is offered an out and chooses not to take it. Rather like Bogart's Roy "Mad Dog" Earle in "High Sierra" (1941) Dillinger is rushing towards death and doing so willingly.
A string of bank robberies across the Midwest in the early 1930s had made him Public Enemy Number One and the focus of FBI director J Edgar Hoover's wrath. He assigns his best agent, Melvin Purvis (played by Christian Bale) to the case with orders to do whatever's necessary to bring an end to Dillinger's activities. PUBLIC ENEMIES is the story of their long drawn-out final showdown, with Dillinger miraculously succeeding in repeatedly outwitting Purvis despite the FBI's superior manpower.
In the process Dillinger becomes something of a folk hero which only serves to infuriate Hoover (played by Billy Crudup) further. Dillinger was one of the first famous criminals to recognise the importance of good PR. He wasn't averse to using hostages as human shields while he shot his way out of the banks he'd just stuck up, but he drew the line at kidnapping for ransom because he knew that wouldn't go down well with the public.
Depp's portrayal of Dillinger is notable for its understatement. Think back over the history of big screen gangsters and the ones that stand out do so because they're a) larger than life, and b) usually psychotic. Depp's Dillinger is actually a pretty regular guy who happens to have a flair for armed robbery. He dreams of stealing enough money to buy a better life somewhere far away with his girl Billie (played by Marion Cotillard with a passable American-ish accent). But the strong suspicion is that dreams are all these are, that Dillinger's sense of himself is shaped entirely by the thrill of crime and outwitting the authorities.
Playing opposite Depp is a thankless task but Bale acquits himself well. There's considerably less depth to his character and, despite representing the forces of law and order, considerably less sympathy for him.
Admirers of Mann's earlier crime thriller "Heat" will recognise similarities with his latest project. Both involve a cat and mouse game between two determined characters on either side of the law, both feature only one scene in which these two actually meet, and both films are visually stunning. Mann's manipulation of colour to recreate the texture of the 1930s is worthy of an Oscar nomination. He makes it possible for us to believe the decade existed in colour rather than the black and white of the movies produced back then.
At a leisurely two hours and twenty three minutes PUBLIC ENEMIES requires a little patience. I liked this film but I didn't love it.

CHARLEY VARRICK: what were they thinking?

If Walter Matthau is remembered at all today, it's as the cantankerously funny star of numerous Billy Wilder directed or Neil Simon scripted comedies of the 60s or 70s. What's less easily recalled is Matthau's attempt in the early 1970s to break out of that mold and recast himself as an action hero.
In retrospect this sounds like a bizarre notion but it clearly made sense to at least some people with the power to greenlight movies because Walter got to play tough in three movies in a row in 1973 and 1974.
CHARLEY VARRICK was the first of the trio with Matthau in the title role as a smalltime bank robber who finds himself in over his head when he inadvertantly steals a large amount of Mob money during a heist.
Despite direction by Don Siegel and a supporting cast including Joe Don Baker and John Vernon this is a pleasant but undistinguished yarn. It feels like a tv movie but with better production values.
What's truly weird isn't the decision to cast Matthau as a tough guy but to make him a ladykiller as well. Matthau has many talents as an actor but he's no oil painting (unless, perhaps, we're talking about a piece by Picasso from his Cubist period).
Yet all it takes is 2 minutes of tough talk, some token slapping around and a suggestive comment about a circular bed for a formerly hard-as-nails secretary to jump into the aforementioned bed with him for a night of wild passion.
For this scenario to be even marginally plausible requires not only that disbelief be suspended but also hanged, drawn and quartered.
I've read that Matthau hated CHARLEY VARRICK, but really, he only has himself to blame for allowing himself to be so monumentally miscast.

BRUNO: Borat-lite

BRUNO arrived at cinemas across the States this weekend riding a tidal wave of pre-release hype. As the sequel - in a manner of speaking - to 2006's "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" an awful lot is expected of the film and if the publicity is to be believed BRUNO more than delivers.
Well, don't believe the hype. If we're talking about delivery BRUNO is more USPS First Class Mail than FedEx Sameday.
Where "Borat" made merciless fun of American ignorance and gullibility, BRUNO exposes the nation's not-so-latent homophobia, but while "Borat" was laugh out loud funny BRUNO is only intermittently amusing.
Both films share a similar initial premise. Where Borat was a tv journalist who traveled to the USA with his director to discover more about the USA, BRUNO is an extravagantly gay Austrian fashionista and tv host who heads to America with a faithful sidekick to find celebrities to appear on his show and become internationally famous himself.
But maybe because "Borat" made even semi-right thinking American celebs wary of going anywhere near a foreigner with a weird accent and a tv camera, the best BRUNO can come up with is Paula Abdul and Republican Congressman Ron Paul. And even they cotton on very fast and scarper.
Their fleeting appearances encapsulate what's wrong with this film. Everything moves too fast, and too many scenarios are discarded without being properly explored. At times it's like watching sketch comedy rather than a full-blown comedy story. An air of desperation creeps in when BRUNO makes a detour to the Middle East (or "Middle Earth" as he calls it) in a bid to find fame by bringing peace to the region. The sequence where he brings Arab and Israeli leaders together to try and make them make friends left me feeling embarrassed and uncomfortable because it was so painfully unfunny.
The speed with which so many of the sequences are despatched leads me to suspect that either the victims caught on to what he was up to or just failed to adequately incriminate themselves to provide much good footage. There are a couple of exceptions, notably the greedy parents willing to put their toddler kids through any danger for a chance to grab the slippery ring of fame, and the 3 good ol' boys from Alabama who take BRUNO hunting and don't take kindly to being compared to the 4 girls from "Sex and the City."
I also suspect that not all of the set-ups are genuine. While it's true that Baron Cohen is fully prepared to put himself in genuine physical danger to make a scene work there are also some situations which feel more staged than spontaneous.
While BRUNO makes it easy for us to be shocked and disgusted by the casual homophobia displayed by so many, one also has to wonder how we would react when confronted by such a prancing in-your-face, sex obsessed gay stereotype who is so determined to offend and outrage rather than simply celebrate who he is.

THEY SHOOT HORSES DON'T THEY: dance like your life depends on it

Whatever other indignities this recession has visited on decent hardworking folk just trying to get ahead in life at least it hasn't imposed on them the grotesque spectacle of the dance marathon.
Dance marathons were an American phenomenon of the 1920s and 30s with couples competing for a cash prize by dancing continuously for days, weeks or even months in the hope of becoming the last pair standing.
With the onset of the Great Depression they became the last hope for many dreaming of an escape from the hopeless poverty they had sunk into. Director Sydney Pollack captures the mood of the era magnificently in THEY SHOOT HORSES DON'T THEY (1969), set in a beachside Santa Monica dance hall in 1931 during what develops into a particularly gruelling dance marathon.
The film is a beautifully drawn character study of desperate people under extreme pressure, forcing themselves on beyond the limits of their endurance in the hope of grabbing the $1500 prize. Jane Fonda is Gloria, embittered and old beyond her years, the skin stretched tight over a face frozen into a permanent expression of resignation. Her dance partner is Robert (Michael Sarrazin), a naive and other-worldly young man who doesn't really know why he's there. Among the other motley competitors is James (Bruce Dern) and his heavily pregnant wife Ruby (Bonnie Bedelia), veteran sailor Red Buttons, and Susannah York as Alice, an actress with the emphasis on the ac, clinging to her fantasy of being discovered by a big Hollywood producer.
Presiding over this three ring circus is the MC, Rocky, played by Gig Young. He deservedly won an Oscar for his multi-layered portrayal of a huckster who's not quite as sleazy or cynical as he thinks he is. It's a performance to be savoured although it wasn't until after the final credits had rolled that I recognised just how good Young is in the part.
The film makes for uncomfortable viewing, putting us in the position of armchair spectators at the public humiliation and mental destruction of people who - but for the grace of god - could be us.
It's not uplifting but it's definitely great cinema.

YEAR ONE: humour for the 4 year old in each of us

YEAR ONE is so inoffensively silly that it's hard to criticise. The film has no pretensions to high art or even good comedy. It's content to just stand there making farting noises and hope that we giggle as much as director Harold Ramis did when he wrote them.
YEAR ONE makes Ramis' previous writing and directing credits ("Groundhog Day," "Stripes'" Caddyshack" to name just a few) look like "Citizen Kane." It's a motley collection of schoolboy jokes about early history acted out by Jack Black and Michael Cera. They're a couple of just out of the caves cavemen who are proficient at neither hunting nor gathering and are therefore useless to their tribe who cast out the pair into the wilderness.
Their random roaming brings them into contact with a random collection of biblical characters and events including Cain and Abel, Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham, and the ancient Romans.
The most impressive aspect of this whole project is Jack Black's admirable restraint. The script offers him countless opportunities to act his loincloth off yet he masterfully (and uncharacteristically) resists them all turning in an understated performance which allows the comedy to breath.
Michael Cera ("Juno", "Superbad") stakes another claim to be the juvenile Woody Allen of the 21st century (for his nerdish klutzy inability to act like a man around women rather than for the sophistication of his humour) while Christopher Mintz-Plasse who was completely unforgettable as McLovin in "Superbad" is completely wasted in a bit part that wouldn't even tax the meagre talents of Corey Feldman.
You won't feel cheated if you pay $5 to see this film. Anything more and you may seriously consider seeing the manager to ask for your money back.