Film
COMEDY/DRAMA NIGHT PEOPLE (15) 94min 0..
To demolish Lord Byron’s quote for the purpose of puerile criticism — 'Night Peep/e shows stars and women in a better light.‘ Set over one cold October night (it is hinted that it may be Halloween) in Edinburgh. writer/director Adrian Mead's feature debut follows the various adventures of five different groups of people. A disillusioned Catholic priest and a homeless ward. a female cabbie and her daughter in the grips of a petty criminal. a stupid dog thief. an elderly blind guy and a London bound runaway have their tales told with varying degrees of success. The trouble is that Mead and Jack Dickson's script veers wildly from superb one liners ('Do you know this wee lassie reeks of pharmaceutical grade cocaine?) to terribly cliched. cringy dialogue. The tone here is so uneven it is difficult to register more than passing interest for this menagerie of Auld Reekie gypsies. tramps and thieves. as they make their progress through the quiet hours toward inevitable redemption. It's an unsurprising mistake to make. more experienced filmmakers. noticeably Jim Jarmusch and Anthony Asquith were unfooted by this format with Night on Earth and the excruciating 1963 Taylor/Burton vehicle The V/Ps respectively.
That said. all the performances (by mostly unknowns) here are excellent and the film is ambitioust and inventively shot and edited on what was clearly a tiny budget. Mead's name is doubtless one we will be hearing more of in years to come. (Paul Dale)
I GFT. Glasgow. from Sun 5— Tue 7 Nov; Cinewor/d, Edinburgh, from Fri 3 NOv— Thu 9 NOV.
ROMANCE BE WITH ME (12A) 93min 0..
in dialogue. Singaporean director Eric Khoo's third feature follows a frustrating arc which is resolved unevenly in the last half hour. Ostensibly it's three intercut stories — Meant to Be. where an old shopkeeper faces up to the loss of his wife; So in Love. detailing nascent love between teenage girls Jackie (Ezann Lee) and Sam (Samantha Tan) and the subsequent rejection of one by the
Eb, 42 THE LIST 2» 16 Nov 2006
hit
ADAPTATION DRAMA LITTLE CHILDREN (15) 136min 0000
It's unusual in contemporary American cinema. or even books. to have a third person narrator. The use of one in Little Children immediately tells us that filmmaker Tedd In The Bedroom Field has abandoned the minimalist references to Ozu With which he illuminated his debut feature in favour of the melodrama of Douglas Sirk and Pedro Almodovar. The narrator sounds like something from The Twilight Zone. and conveniently Little Children is set in a suburban community that seems otherworldly. a place that only really seems to exist in fiction. The narration. like that which sparkled in Amelie and Barry Lyndon. is full of cutting attention to detail. which aids the big screen adaptation of Tom Perrotta's novel.
other: and Finding Love. in which podgy security man Fatty Koh (Yew Seet keng) dreamily stalks a pretty lady. Yet. halfway through the film. the real-life stery of Theresa Chan is also brought into focus.
Going deaf at 14. and subsequently blind. she tells of how she went to school despite those disabilities and how she‘s written her autobiography. Interesting. but what precedes has a Cynical air about it: the dead eye of the camera frames scenes too finely. mocking the sadness and trail hOpes of the fictional characters. As Chan's homily finishes it becomes clear her tale is woven into the fiction of the old shopkeeper. via his son. and a touching moment closes the film. The other two tales end in risible melodrama. confirming that it was wise not to invest much in them.
(Robin Lee) We enter a community in crisis. I Film/rouse. Edinburgh from Fri 70 Mothers are concerned that a sex Nov. offender has moved into the
DRAMA, FANTASY THE PRESTIGE (12A) 128min 0000
Given that Christopher Nolan displayed masterful slight-of-hand with the backwards-unspooling amnesia thriller Memento, he’s the perfect man to adapt Christopher Priest’s novel about a diabolical personal vendetta played out between rival stage magicians in turn-of-the-last-century London. Like Memento, which was based on a short story by Nolan’s younger brother, Jonathan, who here takes co-screenwriter credit, The Prestige boasts a complex and deliberately confounding chronological structure.
Chopped up and reassembled into three interwoven parts, one narrative strand follows sophisticated gentleman magician Rupert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and his gobby working class counterpart Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) as they graduate from fellow stage hands to competitive performers of illusions, the former under the tuition of trick inventor Cutter (Michael Caine). A second narrative strand follows Angier on a trip to America to meet mad scientist Nikola Tesla (David Bowie) in an effort to discover the secret of Borden’s brilliant trick, ‘The Transported Man’, while a third finds Borden imprisoned and awaiting the gallows for the murder of his rival. As the film flashes forwards and backwards between these three strands numerous plot twists are revealed, and it soon becomes clear that by using the language of filmmaking to pull off this series of cleverly contrived narrative tricks, the Nolan brothers are setting themselves up as celluloid magicians. Inkeeping with the magician’s vow never to reveal how his tricks work, however, none of the film’s narrative slights of hand can here be disclosed. Suffice to say, they do for the most part catch the viewer by surprise, and this is the chief pleasure of The Prestige (the title of which is derived from the third and most important part of the performance of a magician’s trick, during which vanished items are reappeared).
In stylistic terms, The Prestige, with its dark and dingy Victorian London setting, doom-laden atmosphere and horror film thrills, resembles Nolan’s previous directing effort Batman Begins (indeed, it’s sandwiched between that film and the forthcoming sequel, The Dark Knight). And beyond the style, there’s some substance to this frequently dazzling film, too, in particular its engagement with a theme that’s been widely associated with Victorian literature - that of ‘the divided self’. (Miles Fielder)
I General release from Fri 7 0 Nov
rieigthiirhood. The mothers congregating in the park are all pure Middle America. except Sarah (Kate Pierce).
An aspiring writer. Sarah inSists on looking after her child but is not a very attentive mother, being forgetful. frustrated and in need of attention herself. Her life spruces up when the town hunk Brad (Patrick Adamson) known as ‘the Prom King' enters her life. Their first kiss is pure magic. a moment to match Grace Kelly's lunge in Rear Window.
Both Brad and Sarah have unhappy marriages. Sarah's husband (Gregg Edelman) gets his pleasures from the internet and Brad's striking documentary filmmaking wife (Jennifer Connelly) makes him feel inadequate.
It is at a scene at a book club where the literary references for this story are spelled out in capital letters. While Sarah's inner angst and romantic yearnings come from Madame Bovarv. the film ventures into Crime and Punishment territory when sex offender Ronnie (Jackie Earle Haley) enters the fray. As in Nicole Kassell's The Woodsman it's not clear whether we should give him the benefit of the doubt. Little Children is a superb adaptation. which is. nevertheless. slightly let down by too much exposition that comes from a desire to give too many characters meaningful time on screen. (Kaleem Aftab)
I Selected release from Fri 3 Nov. See Profile. Film /I idex.
l lORHOR THE HOST (15) 119min 000
When some radioactive Substance finds its way into the water supply. and a huge monster fish rises up out of the peaceful waters around Seoul. a local stallholder's family is all that stands between imminent disasters.
This likeable God/illa-style monster movre front the director of Memories of Murder. Bong Joon-ho. is a satisfactory mix of state of the art CGl effects and warm characterisation: he's clearly a director who cares about his characters. not Just what the speCial effects can do Willi them. He's also a great director of the absurd. inopportune humorous moment. The film is full of these little details. as if the director is more interested in the immediate logic of the Situation and not the narrative logic that insists such details are irrelevant. The film in this sense resembles Tim Burton's Mars