list.co.uk/fi lm Reviews | FILM
ACTION CHASING MAVERICKS (PG) 116min ●●●●● DOCUMENTARY STORIES WE TELL (12A) 116min ●●●●●
THRILLER HUMMINGBIRD (15) 100min ●●●●●
Put Gerard Butler in an action movie (300, Law Abiding Citizen) or a rom-com (The Bounty Hunter, PS I Love You) and the Scottish star seems perfectly at home. But for some reason he’s got a penchant for sports movies where his gruff bravado seems oddly out of context – having tackled football in The Game of their Lives and the truly awful Playing For Keeps, Butler now tries his hand at surfing in Chasing Mavericks.
Taking its story from the real life friendship between two daredevil surfers, Chasing Mavericks details the mentoring of Jay Moriarity (Jonny Weston) by Frosty Hesson (Butler). The moment Moriarity sees Hesson surfing the legendary surf breaks of Santa Cruz, he becomes determined to master the dangerous waves himself. The surfing scenes are impressive, but the distance from which they are filmed rarely places the actors firmly within the action. The result is a frustratingly inert piece of cinema; the story may be remarkable, but the telling is deeply conventional, and despite Butler’s considerable charm and undeniably buff appearance, Chasing Mavericks sinks in choppy water. (Eddie Harrison) ■ General release from Fri 5 Jul.
The ‘we’ in question is the family of the filmmaker, Canadian performer, director and screenwriter Sarah Polley; the stories being told are the personal and – as it turns out – changeable versions of its own history that exist within and around it. Polley lays bare painful parts of her own history by speaking to family members and friends about her mother, stage actor Diane Polley, who died of cancer when Sarah was a child – and discovering some uncomfortable truths. But the point of the film is not to tearjerk over Sarah’s loss, nor to elicit massively divergent accounts of the secret parts of Diane’s life; more to gently probe the ways in which Diane’s children, widower, friends and lovers have made their own sense of her complicated legacy.
The director herself, as likable and attractive a presence onscreen here as she is as an actor, is interestingly elusive. Her living family members, meanwhile, are great company – frank, amusing, generous – and the departed Diane emerges as a poignantly charismatic and intriguing figure. This is a warm, brave and thought-provoking piece of autobiography. (Hannah McGill) ■ EIFF, Cineworld, Fri 21 Jun & Filmhouse, Sat 22 Jun. Limited release from Fri 28 Jun.
Whether it’s Dirty Pretty Things or Eastern Promises, writer Steven Knight’s screenplays have always managed to capture a seedier side to London. And Hummingbird, set around the alleyways of Soho and Chinatown, is no different. It’s just a shame that this directorial debut, about a soldier who falls for a nun (no, really), is about as ludicrous as it sounds.
Jason Statham is Joey Jones, a long-haired hobo on the run from a military court martial and fuelled by vodka, who's still haunted by his time in the Middle East. If Knight had the seeds of a semi- interesting tale of post-traumatic stress disorder, he swiftly veers away from social commentary, as Jones lucks out, breaking into an empty apartment to get his life back on track. Soon enough, he’s working for local Chinese gangsters and falling under the spell of Cristina (Agata Buzek), a nun who feeds London’s homeless every night.
It’d be unfair to say Statham was out of his depth here and Buzek is also a decent performer. But with lines like ‘I believe in justice’, as Statham’s character goes questing for redemption, Hummingbird emerges as a confusing mix of action and arthouse. Sadly, it fails at both. (James Mottram) ■ General release from Fri 28 Jun.
DRAMA THE BLING RING (15) 90min ●●●●●
They were the little devils who stole Prada and fame-hungry LA brats more than ready for their close-ups by the time Vanity Fair profiled them in an article entitled ‘The Suspects Wore Louboutins’. Now, the true story of teenagers behaving badly provides the basis of a breezy, deadpan satire on our 21st century obsession with celebrity culture.
Sofia Coppola’s fascination with the destructive allure of fame and the way it isolates and wounds has dominated her films from Marie Antoinette to the soporific Somewhere. The Bling Ring is a much lighter, slighter variation on that theme as it follows Rebecca (Katie Chang), Nicki (Emma Watson), Marc (Israel Broussard) and friends as they retrace how dreaming about fame led them to finding short cuts to claim it for themselves. In their case, that meant tracking the movements of the rich and famous online before breaking into their home with what seems like ridiculous ease. They stole in excess of $3m in cash, clothes and designer goods from the plush abodes of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Orlando Bloom among others. In some instances, the stars had such an abundance of luxury that they failed to notice anything had been taken.
The Bling Ring adopts a wry, amused tone as it gently dissects the ever decreasing circles of fame and a world where Paris Hilton is perfectly prepared to play herself in a film about being robbed by teenagers hungry for a taste of her notoriety. The young cast clearly has a ball, with Emma Watson on especially spiky form as the naive, wide-eyed Nicki. It is an enjoyable, amusing and well-executed film even if it does feel awfully insubstantial and inconsequential. (Allan Hunter) ■ EIFF, Filmhouse, Sat 22 Jun; Cineworld, Sun 23 Jun. Limited release from Fri 5 Jul.
13 Jun–11 Jul 2013 THE LIST 63