Film
DRAMA FREEDOM WRITERS (12A) 123min .00
.A touching performance from Hilary Swank ensures that Freedom Writers is not just another tripe genre movie about a teacher coming into class room to save savages a la Dangerous Minds. Stand and Deliver and Lean on Me. Set in the aftermath of the 1992 [A riots. a class of High School students are inspired by a naive teacher. Erin Gruwell (Swank). to better themselves through education. Gruwell manages to turn these perceived ignoramuses into honours students by persuading them that their lives in gangland LA are similar to the plight faced by a certain Anne Frank. An allegory made complete when she convinces them to write their own diaries. which were subsequently published in a 1999 book The Freedom Writers that served as a source for this movie.
Away from some of the saccharine classroom bonding moments. Gruwell has to overcome the incandescent Imelda Staunton. playing a stuffy administrator and increasingly frustrated husband (Patrick Dempsey). As in Terence Rattigan's play The Browning Version the students also help the teacher deal with her own peculiar foibles. and it's to writer/director Richard LaGravenese credit that Freedom Writers is most reminiscent of Robert Mulligan's unsurpassed 1967 teacher in the ghetto movie Up the Down Staircase. (Kaleem Aftab)
I General release from Fri 2 Mar.
MELODRAMA AFTER THE WEDDING (15) 123min 0000
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There is a Polish proverb which states that ‘the woman cries before her wedding and the man after'. One man who is certainly crying after a wedding (even though it is not his own) is Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen). A strange series of events have brought him from a street orphanage in India where he works as an aid worker back to his homeland of Denmark. He is looking for funding from multi millionaire businessman Jorgen (Rolf Lassgard). But Jorgen is a gregarious pontificator and before he helps the orphanage he insists that Jacob attends his daughter‘s wedding. What Jacob discovers at the wedding about his own past is to affect his life, and that
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of his hosts in an unimaginable way. God bless the Danes. with their crazy film movements and gift for highly watchable low budget cinema. Ex Dogme duo Suzanne Bier and writer Anders Thomas Jensen reunite for the third time after the giddy heights of 20023 Open Hearts and 2004's Brothers to create a familial drama of almost soap opera proportion. This tale of secrets and lies is a good old fashioned tearjerker. one that questions the idea of the extendable family unit, grief. legacy and. most intriguingly. the transmogrification of two good but very different and flawed men into one better one. It‘s not perfect; the film is too long and a little obvious in places and the big reveal feels oddly placed in the first third of the film. but it is clever and funny and acted with a conviction that is often undermined by the mildly hysterical script. Don't be misled: this melodrama is not on a par with Fassbinder or Sirk's greater works. but it is a film with a heart. a brain and a whole load of soul. (Paul Dale) I Cinewor/d Rentrew Street. Glasgow from Fri 9 Mar. See Mads Mikke/sen interview next issue.
ALSO RELEASED
Ghost Rider (12A) 109min 00 Wild man Nicolas Cage and wonder woman Eva Mendes go almost completely over the top in this Spirited. special effects heavy and somewhat throwaway adaptation of the Marvel Comics supernatural superhero who's a daredevil stunt biker by day and by night a flaming skulled bounty hunter for the devil. See interview. page 39. General release from Fri 2 Mar.
Material Girls (PG) 97min
0 Ava (Haylie Duff) and Tanzie (Hilary Duff) are wealthy and spoilt sisters. Their late father founded a cosmetics empire. which allows them to live a very privileged and carefree life. but when the firm faces a takeover bid from daddy's old arch enemy Fabielle (Anjelica Huston) the girls find their fighting spirit. Shallow. idiotic. deeply depressing ‘tween comedy drama from the appalling filmmaker Martha Coolidge (Valley Girl. The Prince and Me). General release from Fri 2 Mar.
Norbit (12A) 101 min 0 Having won back some credibility for his fine supporting performance role in Dreamgir/s. Eddie Murphy reaches for the fat suit again. Norbit (Murphy) is an orphan brought up in the Chinese restaurant where he was abandoned. When he is forced into marrying the fat. mean, junk food scoffing Rasputia (also played by Murphy), Norbit realises that he has to get back to his childhood sweetheart Kate (Thandie Newton). Nonsense collection of fat. fart and foul sex gags. Avoid. General release from Fri 9 Mar.
DVD ROUNDUP
Highlights this fortnight include. of course. the very quick turnaround release of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Fox 0000 ). As you may have noticed we try not to focus on the really big releases in this column — more the curios and gems -- but Larry Charles/Sacha Baron Cohen's chokineg brilliant spoof documentary deserves a place on anyone's shelf. Extras include three featurettes, one of which is a Kazakhstan Baywatch spoof and deleted scenes.
Bernard lvans xtc Rose's Snuff Movie (Lionsgate 000 ) never got a release in Scotland so it may be worth checking out. Showing the gift for terror he exhibited in Candy/nan Rose details what may have really happened when a famous horror director (Jeroen Krabbe) invites a load of actors to recreate some Manson family-style murders for a film he is making. Needless to say the line between truth and fiction is blurred. Another film that did not receive a Scottish release was The Lives of the Saints (Tartan 000 ). co directed by Scottish photographer Rankin. This odd. poetic tale of crime and angelic conversions in the Turkish area of London is something of a mess but an intriguing one.
Karoly Makk’s lovely and tender 1971 exploration of Love (Second Run/DVD Retail 0000 ). set in 19508 Hungary, opens with a lengthy sequence of a woman reminiscing in bed. and contrasting her nostalgic love in the past with her daughter-in-Iaw‘s desire to see her imprisoned husband. Based on famous Hungarian writer Tibor Dery’s book, the film asks what it means to love. As secrets. lies and hyperbolic letters pile up, a stupefied state of optimism begins to take hold of the film, not unlike that of love itself. This is a dreamy. beautifully distinctive work.
The best box sets include Margaret Tait: Selected Films (Lux 0.000). Tait was a Scottish filmmaker who studied film in Italy in the early 19508 before returning to her birthplace of Orkney. She believed more than most in William Carlos Williams' famous declaration that there are 'no ideas but in things“. Though she made a feature near the end of her life, Blue Black Permanent (1992). her genius was for capturing reality in the raw and shaping it, not to the demands of conventional narrative. but to the complexity of the moment. She would accumulate the moments until they took the shape of a film poem, and often used a music track to help bring out the poetry - as we find in perhaps her finest film, Where /Am is Here (1964). A haunting 35min masterpiece on Edinburgh in the mid 19603, it shows Tait to be, alongside Bill Douglas. probably Scotland's most important filmmaker. This is a vital collection for anyone interested in Scottish cinema.
Another box set highlight is the Catherine Deneuve Collection (Optimum 0000 ) which includes Umbrellas of Cherbourg and the rare, sexy 1968 drama Manon 70. Meanwhile. the Guillermo Del Toro Collection (Optimum coco.) features the director's three best films The Devil's Backbone, Pan '3 Labyrinth and his debut Cronos. Borat aside. the funniest film of the fortnight is the cheapo re-release of the 1972 Australian cult comedy film The Adventures of Barry Mackenzie (Guerilla Films .0000) starring Barry Humphreys. Peter Cook and Spike Milligan. This is so funny that I guarantee you will ‘splash ye boots'. Next issue we'll be grabbing some Golden Balls and trying to ‘Blow the bloody doors offl' (Paul Dale and Tony McKibbin)