Film
ALSO RELEASED
Asterix and the Vikings (U) 76min .0 A slight improvement on the last animated adventure of the littlest Gaul (1989's Aster/x and the Big Fight) and much better than the last live action adaptation (2002's Aster/x and Obelisk: Mission Cleopatrai. Some fairly puerile changes have been made to the original graphic novel (in the film. Getidurix has a pigeon named SMS who acts as a mobile. Grossebaf. the Viking chief. has a daughter named Abba and worst of all there's a Viking Wizard whose future daughter-in-law is obsessed Wlllt decoration. Her name. painfully, is Vikea. This is. however. a fairly solid if uninspired attempt to catch the essence of Goscinny and Uderzo. Selected release from Sat 20 Jan.
Blood Diamond (15) 143min CO More contrived. pseudo liberal tosh from director Edward Zwick iGlory, The Last Samurai'i. Set against the backdrop of civil war in 1990s Sierra Leone. this is the stery of Danny iLeonardo DiCapriOi. an ex-mercenary from Zimbabwe. and Solomon Vandy (DjilllOll Hounsoui. a Mende fisherman. two-African born men whose fates are to cross in their guest to recover a rare diamond. But guess what? The nasty mercenary has an epiphany and tries to help 'dem poor folks'. This cack is elevated by decent performances by the leads but screenwriter Charles K FAX Leavitt's attempts to give this pedestrian adventure thriller a topical twist are just embarrassing. General release from Fri 26 Jan.
The Return (15) 85min 0. British director Asif The I’Varrior Kapadia makes his Hollywood debut WIlh an undernourished slow- build psycho-horror about saleswoman Joanna iSarah Michelle Gellari who attempts to face her childhood demons when her work takes her back to her hometown. The Return feels wretched. tedious and slender by comparison to Kapadia's previous film. General release from Fri l9 Jan.
Suburban Mayhem (15) 89min 0. This Aussie mockumentary is a fairly cynical attempt to tap into the box office potential of rising star Emily Barclay iln My Hither}; Den and the forthcoming Bronte biopici. Katrina Skinner iBarclay‘i is a bad girl. her older brother's in prison for beheading a man and she's hell- bent on followrng nim. Fake parents. policemen and neighbours line tip to talk earnestly about her troubled past but the whole thing is so badly staged and appallingly acted iespecially. regrettably. by Barclay; that you won't buy it for a second. Surprisingly. this mess was directed by Paul Goldman, the man who made the very entertaining The Night We a/led it Day. Showcase Cinema. Coatbrige; Showcase Cinema, Paisley from Fri 26 Jan.
40 THE LIST ‘18 Jan lleli Qti‘tii‘
DRAMA BABEL (15) 143min COO
Somewhere down the cra/y river there's a little shack where screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros. 2t Grams) churns out his indentikit scripts. This is how he does it. He looks at his holiday snaps. and then he imagines a catastrophic event. say a car crash or a shooting. that will connect a large group of characters over several different borders. Then he writes a load of vignettes around sets of one or two of these characters. always keeping in mind that some of these roles need to go to big name US stars who have made a few turkeys recently. For extra effect he underlines everything with some adolescent message about connections or something like that and then he prays that all the time shifts fit together. When it works its great: when it doesn't it's grating. Babel unfortunately falls into the latter category. with its Morrocan.
American Mexrcan and Japanese
settings featuring megastars Brad Pitt. Cate Blanchett. Gael Garcia Bernal and Japanese starlet Rinko Kikuchi and lots of less well known actors. The results are uneven: the sections in Morocco without Pitt and Blanchett about two rural kids and their new gun are fantastic. and remind one of what a gifted. naturalistic filmmaker Alejandro Gon/aIe/ Inarritu is. The same can be said of the odd. spacey. transient Japanese sections featuring Kikuchi as a profoundly deaf teenager who desperately wants a sexual experience.
The rest is cliched nonsense. This is the type of film that reaches for significance despite being built on a house of sand and fog. In the Bible. Genesis 1 f: 1—9 the attempt to build the Tower of Babel angered God so llltl()ll tlizit lit} Ill£l(l(3 ()£l(2ll r)(>rs;()ii involved speak a different language which ultimately halted the protect and scattered his people across the planet. The analogies are enrbarrassingly obvrous. but association with the Hebrew verb ‘balal' — ‘to confuse or confound' etymologises the word Babel. and this Arriaga and lnarritu do .n spades. iPaul Dalel I General release from Fri If) Jan.
rioenon THEM (15) 78min .0
A young French couple living in an old mansion 30 kilometres outside of Bucharest are woken one dark night by the sounds of intruders. Thereafter. a game of cat and mouse commences as the man and woman Creep around their labyrinthine home stalked by persons or
INTERVIEW
DUTCH MASTER Controversial filmmaker Paul Verhoeven is going back to his roots with his first Dutch film for over 20 years. Miles Fielder catches up with him.
Two decades after he left Holland for Hollywood’s dream factory, Paul Verhoeven has gone home to make his first Dutch film in 24 years. Having established himself as a critically and commercially successful maverick talent in Tinseltown with blockbusters such as Robocop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct and Starship Troopers, the 68-year-old has returned to his filmmaking roots with Black Book, a racy but intelligent thriller about Nazi resistance and collaboration in wartime Holland that recalls one of his most celebrated pre-Hollywood films, Soldier of Orange. It is a homecoming in more ways than one.
‘I had become a film director because I thought I could express something in an artful way,’ he says. ‘But that became more difficult in the last few years in the US. After doing Hollow Man I promised myself I would only take on a movie that I cared about. So I had to come back and do something that I believed in again.
‘I’ve also returned to the roots of my childhood,’ says Verhoeven. ‘I was seven when the war ended and I have very strong memories about it . . . It was a horrible time. But the fascination with the war as a child was also a very strong aspect. The launching pads of the V28 were about one mile from my house, so I could see these enormous rockets going over my head, which were the most spectacular special effects ever.’
Although Black Book combines the breakneck pacing of a boy’s own adventure with lashings of Verhoeven’s trademark sex and violence, it is also a provocative interrogation of a shameful period of history in which Dutch collaborators turned over Jews to the Nazis. ‘You would expect that the things that are revealed on the big screen would be hurting for a Dutch audience,’ Verhoeven says, ‘but to my amazement, nothing like that happened. They embraced it. The Dutch seem to accept the movie for what it is and these dark tones are not disturbing them.’
Despite its thrilling chase sequences and shoot-outs and typically outrageous set-pieces, Black Book nevertheless represents a return to realistic filmmaking for Verhoeven. ‘It is a companion piece to Soldier of Orange,’ he says. ‘Coming back from the US I had a strong inclination to be realistic and historically correct.’
Verhoeven’s not going back to America to make another Hollow Man. Instead, he’s staying put in Holland, to adapt the bestselling Dutch novel Kneeling on a Bed of Roses. No chance of a sequel to Showgirls, then.
I Black Book is on selected release from Fri 79 Jan. See rewew. page 38.
things unknown.
Co—directed by fzrst time French filmmakers Xavier Palud and David Moreau. Thorn :s an exercise in prolonging suspense that feels very drawn out indeed. There's nothing wrong with keeping the exact nature of the horror secret until the f:nai scenes of the film. nor '.'/lllt attempting to btiild the suspense wtnout recourse to cheap shocks. The problem hem is the lengthy lead tip to the denouement sn't particularly scary. while the characters mousey teacher Clementine ()ihfilél Bonamy. who you may remember from the excellent iii.ii‘dt>i' dra'na Berni/11.8; Lipsi and irr.tating novelist Lucas (Michael Coheni. aren't interesting
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