Reviews
CRIME CAPER LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN (18) 110min 0”
Scottish director Paul McGuigan's latest is his best film to date. McGuigan takes the Violent crime elements of his Gangster No 7 and throws in the twists and turns of his L'Appartement remake Wicker Park to Create an enJOyable caper. When SleVin (Josh Hartnett) Sublets an apartment With cool wallpaper he is mistaken fOr his landlord. who iust happens to owe two feuding crime lords (Ben Kingsley and Morgan Freeman) a heap of cash. To add to his woes, a mysterious hitman (Bruce Willis) is pulling strings behind the scenes making SIeVIn's life a misery. The only piece of luck SleVin has is that his neighbour (Lucy LlU) wants to help
him out in every way possible. It's a rollercoaster ride that is heavy on atmosphere and great wallpaper, but light on originality. Each turn WI“ keep you guessing what will happen next but the ultimate twist is a let down because there is no rhyme or reason for it and consequently the film feels a little thin and you will feel a little cheated. (Kaleem Aftab)
I General release from Fri 24 Feb. See interview, page 40.
ROMANTIC COMEDY DATE MOVIE (15) 90min .0 Jason Friedberg. the writer behind the Scary Movre franchise. makes his directorial debut with this distinctly patchy spoof of romantic movies. He doesn't mine cinematic history deeply (When Harry Met Sally is the oldest film referenced). so most of the movie is spent recycling gags from films made this century. such as Meet the Fockers (here the Fonckyerdoders — funny. huh?) My Big Fat Greek Wedding and The Wedding Planner.
While it's not an edifying experience. a couple of visual gags hit the bull's eye — Michael Jackson tempting a boy with a lollipop may cause cola to fizz out of your nostrils. Some of the comedic performances are passable, too. with veteran US comedienne Jennifer
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For 90% of the time. however. Dare MOI/l8 is pitiful. ilan Wintertow I General release from 2.: Feet;
ACTION, onewruee so P AEON FLUX (15) 92min 0
It's the year 2415 and a deadly VITLIS. the era‘s apocalypse of chOice. has ali but wiped out the human race. The surVivors are clustered together in a utopian idyll. Logan '3 Run-style. members of the eVil techriocrat government are coming after them but rebel assassm Aeon Flux (Charlize Theron) is ready.
A derivative and distinctly ho-hum premise does not automatically make for a bad SCi-fi mowe (prime example: Star Wars). Nevertheless. Aeon Flux is terrible. As you'd expect of a film based on series of short MTV cartoons and aimed at sweaty teens With attention deficit disorder. it‘s loud and brainless. only interrupting its unimaginative action pieces to have its cast (comprising alarmingly good actors) spout dialogue that makes The Matrix seem like Shakespeare. It's just Zardoz for the noughties generation, and if you get that reference may God help you.
(lan Winterton) I General release from Fri 77 Feb.
PERIOD ROMP CASANOVA (12A) 111min O.
The world's greatest lover returns in the form of the pretty but dull Heath Ledger in Lasse Hallstrom's glossy period romp. setting the Venetian paramour against the moralistic killjoys of the Inquisition as he attempts to woo the fair Francesca (played with insipid grace by Sienna Miller). Despite an expenswe attempt to import wit by the yard through hiring Tom Stoppard for a script polish, Hallstrbm quickly gets caught up in lavish but irrelevant details. There are CGl balloon rides, rooftop chases and a selection of fat jokes at the expense of Paprizzio. the lard king of Genoa (Oliver Platt). But the missing ingredient is sex: by trying to please the Widest possible audience. Ledger's Casanova is uncomfortably bowdlerised. Substituting
BIOGRAPHY [lit/Unfit CAPOTE (15) 114min 0.0
By the late 19505 Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman) was arguably already more famous than any other living American writer, with the possible exception of Hemingway. His debut novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), his 1951 play The Grass Harp and his 1958 novel Breakfast at 77ffany’s had given him celebrity beyond his wildest Alabama imaginings. Capote, however, yearned for literary influence and so in 1959 he pitched a story to The New Yorker and dragged his best friend Harper Lee (Christine Keener) to rural Kansas to investigate the brutal murders of farmer Herb Clutter, his wife and his two teenage children. What followed was sad, shocking and, in terms of US literature, near revolutionary and would result in the publication of Capote’s only ‘non fiction novel‘, In Cold Blood.
By choosing to concentrate solely on this period of Capote‘s eventful life, screenwriter Dan Futterman and director Bennett Miller highlight the conflict between Capote‘s self-absorbed obsession with finishing the book and his compassion for his subjects (Clutter killers Perry Smith and Richard Hickok). The success of pulling off the micro biography nearly always comes down to the performances and it is here that Capote hits the mark.
Hoffman virtually inhabits Capote's tiny frame and comes on like a cross between Cartman from South Park and Blanche Dubois. He catches the man’s rhythm and tragedy, his laziness, his rural gothic Southernisms and his learned Northern urbanity, but most of all he reinforces the idea of this man’s flaky callousness and need of affirmation. With brilliant support from Keener (one is left in no doubt that without Lee’s diligent investigative work Capote would not have had a story, due mainly for his penchant for scaring witnesses with inappropriate reminiscences and intrusive monologues), Clifton Collins Jr as handsome killer Smith and Chris Cooper as chief detective Dewey. In short this is one big thespian hoedown.
The trouble is that these great actors are taking part in what is for all intents and purposes a TV movie. With its sparse soundtrack and neat period detail shorthand, Capote shares many of the shortcomings of the two previous film versions of In Cold Blood (mostly that the complexities and subtleties of great books are often cinematically untranslatable). The only difference here is that the character of Capote himself has been replaced back into this tragedy of victimhood. Lee may have been his conscience but we are simply invited along to bear witness to the cultural birth and death of a legend. As such this is a dour, all too sober affair; one likes to think that the real Capote would have excused himself from any screening to go and take some hallucinogens. (Paul Dale)
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‘.‘r:' THE LIST 41