HEIST COMEDY OCEAN’S THIRTEEN (PG) 121 min 000
After taking a gamble with Ocean's Twelve's three date European heist storyline. Steven Soderbergh takes a safe bet in returning this franchise to a casino heist in America. The director even pokes fun at the audience's desire to see familiar faces doing the same old things in movie franchises when Don Cheadle. bad English accent and all. (juips. ‘We can't do the same gag twice. It's boring if we do the same gag twice!‘ Soderbergh sticks to the template. he seems to have forgotten that occasionally familiarity breeds contempt.
The first scene is an apology for the absence of both Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta Jones. Ouickly writing them out of the script Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt) moan about their partners making life tough for them at home and refusing to come out to play. The duo round-up the troops to ensure that the dastardly new casino owner Willy Banks (Al Pacino) doesn't pull a fast one on their old buddy Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould). All the characters are pretty much as they were in the previous movies. The movie has the infuriating habit of setting up an obstacle in one scene just so that it can be overcome in the very next. Nevertheless this old schoolboy's reunion manages to entertain through the quality of the performances and some assured filmmaking. lKaleem Aftabl I General release. Fri 8 Jun.
DOCUMENTARY ZIZEK! (15) 81 min 0000
The exclamation mark in the film's title is entirely appropriate as Astra Taylor's film explores the life and work of the mercurial Slovenian thinker Slavoj Zi/ek. Prolific, paradOXical and profane ncgetarians are ‘degenerates who will turn into monkeys'). Zi/ek is wonderful documentary material. not just because he's often extremely funny and provocative. but also due to the nature of his thinking. He's an intellectual who thinks on his feet. and so each new situation leads to a new set of thoughts and observations. Where Kirby Dick's 2002 film Derrida was as exhaustineg eguivocating as its subject's work. Zi/ek.’ is as immediate as lightning. Based chiefly around lectures Zizek gave in Buenos Aires. New York and Boston. we also get to see the great man at home in Ljubljana with his son. and in confessional mode when he talks about his angst over disappearing
INTERVIEW
PARIS IN BOOM
Tom Dawson talks to Guillame Canet the man behind the best and most successful Parisian-set thriller of the year
A spring Saturday morning at London’s Claridges Hotel. Over scrambled eggs, toast and coffee, the French actor turned director Guillaume Canet is pondering why his innocent-man-on-the-run-thriller Tell No One, a dynamic adaptation of a novel by US crime writer Harlan Coben, has proved such a box-office success in France.
‘I think it’s because the main character Alex Beck [played by Francois Cluzet] is a normal man,’ explains the charming thirty-four-year-old in his fluent English. ‘What happens to him could happen to anyone. He’s not a conventional hero. He’s somebody who has lost his wife, and all his actions are motivated by his love for her. The love story is so important to the film - it’s the engine to the thriller.
‘I wasn’t expecting this to happen, but after the film came out in France people came up to me in the street and they wanted to talk about Tell No One and how much they’d loved it. They’d seen it three or four times, because they wanted to understand why the characters had behaved like they had. And different cinema managers told me that people were really emotionally affected by the film and were staying in their seats long after the credits had finished.’
From the outset the director relished the opportunity to a make a thriller that, in contrast to genre conventions, could primarily be filmed outdoors and in summer. ‘Very quickly I realised that I could shoot the film with lots of details like Michael Mann does,’ he adds. ‘We shot the accident on the Boulevard Peripherique [part of the film’s thrilling central chase sequence] with just two wide shots, because we wanted the close-ups on the actors.’
Presumably he must have felt under considerable pressure directing a film, with multiple locations and complicated, chronological story. ‘No,’ he smiles. ‘I spent a lot of time preparing how things would be shot. But I didn’t feel pressure about the money or the famous actors. I just didn’t think about those things. You have to draw on your unconscious when you make a film - you can’t worry about whether it’s costing a lot of money.’
I Tell No One, Cameo. Edinburgh and selected cinemas, Fri 15 Jun. See Also Released. page 42.
if he shuts up. No fear of that here as he explores such subjects as ‘bad food' which contains its own opposite. Before moderation was the key, now the antithetiml becomes synonymous: alcohol free beer. decaf coffee. fat free cream. Then there's the idea of the term ‘enjoy' becoming an imperative: we can't perhaps enjoy something: we must enjoy it. But how can we enjoy something that becomes a mandatory pleasure?
Sometimes in print leek's paradoXical thinking can lead up a blind alley. or to an intensely original thought. but here it becomes something in between L and closer to a brilliant stand up routine. He might not be happy With the comparison, but we could have found the new Bill Hicks. (Tony McKibbinl I OFT. Glasgow, Fri 15 8 Sat 76 Jun.
Name Jorge Sanchez-Cabezudo Born 1972, Madrid. Spain Background Having stayed put in Spain's first city of cinema. Sanchez-Cabezudo found an apprenticeship in filmmaking through television. He has for some years been writing a popular teen soap, which he continues to pen to pay the bills. In 1996. Sanchez-Cabezudo was nominated for a Goya (Spain's equivalent of the Oscars) for his short film La Gotera, a macabre chiller about a dead body falling through the ceiling of a man's apartment. His debut feature The Night of the Sunflowers is another dead body crime story, set in a rural community in the countryside west of Madrid and boasting a complex narrative structure that passes the story baton-like from one member of the ensemble cast to the next.
What’s he up to now? This talented thirtysomething Spaniard is currently basking in the praise being lavished on The Night of the Sunflowers, which was nominated for three Goyas last year, losing with no shame or dishonour to fellow-Madrid filmmaker Pedro Almodovar's Vo/ver. On the back of the reception of his debut. Sanchez-Cabezudo is attempting to get one or more of the handful of scripts he has written off the ground as his next film.
What he says about film’s rural setting 'I made the film in the countryside because I wanted a different setting from cities. where this type of crime story is usually set. I also wanted to highlight the rural decline that is affecting many communities in Spain. This way of life is vanishing and this is a problem, but in the EU the countryside is not a priority. With my film I’m not trying to judge the situation. Instead I'm raising the question about the countryside in an effort to provoke some debate among the public.‘ Interesting fact Sanchez- Cabezudo’s love of film was inherited from his cinefile father. He cites American cinema of the 19708. particularly Sam Peckinpah's own rural crime tale Straw Dogs, among his influences. (Miles Fielder)
I The Night of the Sunflowers, GFT, Glasgow, Fri 8—Thu 74 Jun. See Also Released, page 42.
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