www.list.co.uk/film DRAMA A TOUCH OF LOVE (12) 104min (Optimum) ●●●●●
A late 60s adaptation of Margaret Drabble’s novel The Millstone, A Touch of Love holds up 40 years later less as an examination of one woman’s decision to have a baby, than as a fascinating look at late 1960s London life. Sandy Dennis plays PhD student Rosamund who’s looking for love, but it is in the way the film captures the area of London in which she lives everywhere it seems is within a mile radius of the Post Office tower). Director Waris Hussein manages to bring out a tender story from this very plausible milieu. As we see Dennis wooed by various suitors, she manages to get pregnant with television news presenter George (Ian McKellan). Critic Pauline Kael said in a review of an earlier Dennis film that she had ‘exhausted her bag of tics’, but here, playing very English and very repressed, she manages to reenergise them. Minimal extras. (Tony McKibbin) SHORTS THE SHORT FILMS OF DAVID LYNCH (15) 91min (Scanbox) ●●●●●
Whether you love or loathe the work of David Lynch, one thing you don’t hear too often being said about this ‘Jimmy Stewart from Mars’ (c/o Mel Brooks), is that his films are riddled with clichés. Yet as Lynch himself reveals in the intro for The Cowboy and the Frenchman, exactly that accusation was thrust at him by a Gallic TV executive. And to be fair, this mini-movie with Harry Dean Stanton and
Jack Nance does cross a few stereotypical boundaries that should really have been left untrammelled. Elsewhere in this
collection of material made between 1966 and 1996, the wilder corners of his imagination run rampant. Six Men Getting Sick is a queasily repetitive animation while his best-known short The Grandmother actually wields a plot you can almost follow. Yet, the most potent piece here is, at 52 seconds, also the briefest. Premonitions Following an Evil Deed with its submerged naked woman and ghoul carrying a frying pan is a disturbing snapshot of a subconscious mind that no one should probe too deeply into. Extras include film introductions by Lynch. (Brian Donaldson)
FANTASY THE RING FINGER (15) 100min (Second Sight) ●●●●●
Diane Bertrand’s curious 2005 film finally gets an overdue UK DVD release on the back of star Olga Kurylenko’s newfound status as a Bond girl. Based on a novel by Japanese writer Yogo Ogawa, outré French filmmaker Bertrand’s film features the Ukrainian model turned actress as Iris, a young woman who finds her life intertwined with that of her amorous boss (Marc Barbe) at
the laboratory where she works and the sailor (Stipe Erceg) she shares a room with. Relocating Ogawa’s opaque prose into a European dream world reminiscent of those of Angela Carter, Bertrand sends Iris off on a series of suggestive and enigmatic adventures, all to a soundtrack by Portishead’s Beth Gibbons. With its dense symbolism, The Ring Finger comes on like as feminised variation on the retro-obscure world of Delicatessen directors Jeunet and Caro. Which is no bad thing. Minimal extras. (Paul Dale) HORROR SOLSTICE (15) 87min (Icon) ●●●●●
What should you do when you co-create the most distinctive horror movie in a generation? Well, what Daniel Myrick did after the landmark lo- fi chiller Blair Witch Project was to disappear with as much trace as his filmmaking trio in the Maryland woods, finally raising his head above the parapet for this straight to DVD affair.
Ditching claustrophobic verité for the clearer artifices of fiction, this tale of a bunch of impossibly attractive airheads hanging out in a scary forest during the summer solstice with the ghost of a dead woman possibly haunting her twin sister should probably have been awful. Yet with some pleasingly restrained performances and, no surprise here, a spine-tingling twist ending, the feeling that you should re-watch Solstice to pick up on the clues which foreshadow the finale leaves an indelible handprint on your mind. Minimal extras. (Brian Donaldson)
DVD Reviews Film DVD ROUND-UP
Lotte Reiniger
Before the onslaught of Christmas DVDs, box sets and Blu-ray re-issues, it’s worth stopping to look at the more unusual flowers in the home entertainment palm house.
Armenian filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov is honoured with the release of two of his tableau vivant style folktales The Legend of Suram Fortress and Ashik Kerib (both Artificial Eye) both ●●●●●. Best known for his 1968 film The Colour of Pomegranates, Paradjanov was one of the great poet filmmakers whose small body of work is easily comparable to that of Jean Cocteau. Sadly unlike Cocteau, Paradjanov died in prison in the early 1990s on trumped up charges of ‘homosexuality and illegal traffic in religious icons’. These beautiful, unforgettable adaptations of Georgian and Azerbaijani folktales need to be seen to be believed. The short films of silhouette animation queen Lotte Reiniger are given a long
overdue showcase in Lotte Reiniger: The Fairy Tale Films (BFI) ●●●●●. Reiniger, who made The Adventures of Prince Achmed, taken to be the first animation feature in 1926, was undoubtedly the progenitor for much that was to follow in the animation and children’s entertainment field. This excellent two- disc set includes John Issacs’ 1970 book The Art of Lotte Reiniger. Alfred Hitchcock: The Wartime Resistance Films (Network) ●●●●● proves (if nothing else) that this son of an East End greengrocer didn't just sit the war out in America, while The Bruce Weber Collection (Metrodome) ●●●●● contains one great film (Let’s Get Lost) and three interesting but mediocre ones (Chop Suey, A Letter to True and Broken Noses).
The best standalone reissues are the 30th anniversary edition of ex-Python Eric Idle’s 1978 Beatles spoof The Rutles: All You Need is Cash (Second Sight) ●●●●● is still the daddy of all spoof rockumentaries and the lovely Blu- ray pressing of Zulu (Paramount) ●●●●●, the eminently quotable 1969 film about the Battle of Rourke’s Drift, Natal in 1879 starring a youthful Michael Caine. ‘Do carry on with your mudpies.’ (Paul Dale)
ACTION/ADVENTURE THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM (12) 99min (Lionsgate) ●●●●● Rob Stuart Little Minkoff’s likeably energetic homage to the Chinese martial arts exploitation flicks best epitomised by the Shaw Brothers Studio output in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, a period of creativity that produced King Hu’s classic Come Drink With Me, Chang Che’s Five Deadly Venoms and The One Armed Swordsman and the Seven Little Fortunes – a group of high kicking drama school students who grew up to become Jackie Chan, Sammy
Chou), vengeful daughters (Lui Yifei) and silent monks (Jet Li). Minkoff’s playful, silly and lightweight film benefits from John Fusco’s clever, multi- referential adaptation of Ming dynasty novelist Wu Cheng’en’s original short story. The fight scenes are good but there is a little bit too much exposition. On the whole though this is a decent family film for Christmas. Sold on one- disc and two-disc editions this film is also out on Blu-ray. Depending which version you get, the extras include deleted scenes, featurettes, a blooper reel and much more. (Paul Dale)
Hong and Corey Yuen. Mixing up The Karate Kid with the Narnia adventures, The Forbidden Kingdom follows introverted wuxia DVD obsessed South Boston teenager Jason (Michael Angarano) into an ancient Chinese world of inebriated scholars (Jackie Chan), evil warlords (Collin
27 Nov–11 Dec 2008 THE LIST 57