Film Reviews

112 posts

Wonkas

Film Film Reviews

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Tim Burton, 2005) and

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (Mel Stuart, 1971)

“If we’d had Milligan or Sellers romping through it and a hundred children playing the Oompa-Loompas, we’d have had a fantasy like The Wizard of Oz. But they ruined it.” – Roald Dahl, on Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (1971)

One of the interesting side effects of the release of Tim Burton’s new take on Roald Dahl’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is that suddenly Mel Stuart’s 1971 adaptation is routinely being described as a “classic.” Since when? Although a staple of childhood viewing for three decades, I had never really thought of the film as particularly well regarded. It’s well remembered, certainly: its sheer garishness, and elements of creepy kitsch (such as the orange-skinned, green-haired Oompa-Loompas) mean it’s a film that sticks in the mind. Yet I always considered it deeply flawed, and welcomed the idea of an artist as talented as Tim Burton taking on a new version. As I wrote some time ago (here) Burton is a filmmaker whose sensibilities are ideally suited to combining the fantastic and macabre elements of Dahl’s material into a satisfying whole, as opposed to Stuart’s often-uncomfortable juxtaposition of jarring elements. What’s more, he had all the mistakes of the first version to learn from, and the benefits of modern technology. So it’s an immense surprise to find not only that Burton’s version is something of a disappointment, but also that on revisiting Stuart’s, it holds up better than I had remembered.

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Stone Face

Film Film Reviews

The General (Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman, 1927)

If you’re going to introduce somebody to silent films – and what a good, true friend that would make you – then there is no better place to start than with the works of Buster Keaton. While Charlie Chaplin was always much more admired in his lifetime, and managed a vastly more successful career after the introduction of sound, Keaton’s work has probably aged better. He’s more cinematic, less sentimental, and simply more fun. Chaplin was considered at the time the pre-eminent comic artist of silent film, but as much as I like his work, to modern audiences I think he is too obviously striving for greatness. Looking back, now that neither has a point to prove – we take it as a given that both were seminal film artists – Keaton’s lack of pretension is more appealing. The General isn’t quite his best work (Sherlock Junior is even better) but it is the best of his films available on DVD in this country.

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Putting the Hustle into Kung Fu

Film Film Reviews

Kung Fu Hustle (Stephen Chow, 2004)

It used to be possible to split martial arts films roughly into two broad categories: those that featured largely unassisted physical feats, such as the films of Jackie Chan; and those reliant on more over-the-top, heavily faked wire-work, such as Once Upon a Time in China or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The last few years, however, have seen the emergence of a variant of the latter: computer assisted martial arts, as seen prominently in the fight with many Agent Smiths in The Matrix Reloaded. Here the computer fakery moves beyond just the digital removal of wires, and starts creating digital stunt men and props. Once a fight is at least partially animated inside a computer, anything is possible. In unassisted martial arts, a kick might knock someone over. With wire-work, it might send them flying across a room. With digital martial arts, however, it can send them over the horizon.

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War Weary

Film Film Reviews

War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, 2005)

It’s sort of amazing, really, that Steven Spielberg is still top of the Hollywood tree. Given the constant upping of the ante since his Jaws (along with Star Wars) basically invented the modern Hollywood blockbuster, you would think he might have fallen by the wayside. Yet with War of the Worlds he once again steps up to the plate and shows just why he continues to lead the pack of A-list directors. War of the Worlds is his take on familiar material: not only has H.G. Wells’ novel been filmed before (in a George Pal-produced 1953 version), but it was the source material for Orson Welles’ infamous radio broadcast that spooked America in 1938. And, of course, it was the unofficial jumping off point for Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day in 1996. It is a perfect choice of project for Spielberg, forming as it does a companion piece with his classic tale of benevolent aliens, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. If that film was kind of a sixties hangover, with its stirring finale of intergalactic peace, love, and harmony, then War of the Worlds is the grim, bitter and bleak counterpoint. It’s an extremely well made and effective film, but a feel-good thrill ride it certainly is not.

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Now You Know

Film Film Reviews

Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Kore-eda), 2004

Original Japanese Title: Dare mo shiranai

Nobody Knows is the most frustrating kind of filmgoing experience: halfway to being a wonderful film, it is unfortunately let down by a few critical flaws.

Based on real events, it follows the lives of four Japanese children who, as the film starts, are being smuggled into their new apartment by their flighty, irresponsible mother. The landlord thinks only one child is in the house, and the children have been raised to evade detection. The eldest son, twelve-year-old Akira (played by Yuya Yagira), is the most responsible in the household, cooking meals and caring for his siblings during his mother’s increasingly long absences. But one day she simply fails to come home, and the children must fend for themselves.

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Hot Sith

Film Film Reviews

Revenge of the Sith (George Lucas, 2005)

You could hate Revenge of the Sith, if you wanted to.

 The night before seeing it, I re-watched much of the original Star Wars, and was captured once again – as always – by its magic. There is a strange alchemy at work in Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back (and sporadically in Return of the Jedi) that the prequels haven’t recaptured. For all sorts of reasons, the prequels are not the return to that universe we all hoped for when the prequels were originally announced: they look different and feel different. If you measure the prequels against the originals, and dwell on what’s missing, you can’t help but mourn for what the prequels could have been. Revenge of the Sith is still not the journey back to that feeling of glorious fantasy that Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back achieved. As such, it isn’t everything that either Star Wars fans or casual moviegoers might have hoped, and there will be those who hate it for that.

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Defiantly Uplifting

Film Film Reviews

The Sea Inside (Alejandro Amenábar, 2004)

Spanish Title: Mar Adentro

The posters and press ads for Alejandro Amenábar’s The Sea Inside are not terribly enlightening: the face of hunky Javier Bardem dominates the image, set against the featureless blue of the sea. There is no indication of the content of the film, which centres on the quest by Ramón Sampedro (Bardem), a quadraplegic, to end his own life. Yet there is a greater honesty at work here, for the film is not the worthy-but-gruelling experience that the material might have you expecting. The Sea Inside is a tender and often funny film that is always engrossing and ultimately deeply moving.

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Symphony of the Forest

Film Film Reviews

Bambi (David Hand, 1942)

Bambi was the last great Disney cartoon. It was the last in his amazing run of features between 1937 and 1942 (following Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Dumbo), and was in many ways the climax of that sequence. After Bambi the studio would never quite be the same again: a divisive strike, financial difficulties, and World War II would see Disney give up on true feature film production for the rest of the forties. For all their virtues, the features he would make later (starting with Cinderella in 1950) never reached the heights of these first five features. Bambi, with its cute baby animals and impeccable animation, is also probably the film that epitomises the common perception of Disney films.

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Loopy as an Airshow

Film Film Reviews

The Aviator (Martin Scorsese, 2004)

The Aviator sees one of the most celebrated of living filmmakers chronicle the life of one of the twentieth century’s most extravagant and flamboyant figures. Howard Hughes has been an obvious and tempting topic for ages: there has already been one film biography, the 1977 The Amazing Howard Hughes, with Tommy Lee Jones (which I haven’t seen), and Spielberg was kicking around Hughes as a subject with William Goldman and Warren Beatty back in the early 1990s. The Aviator is a somewhat old-fashioned, straightforward biopic, and it will never make a list of Scorsese’s greatest movies, but it’s a highly polished and engaging movie that for the most part overcomes some flaws in its screenplay.

Hughes’ astonishing life has so many facets that it provides almost too much for any one film, and The Aviator wisely narrows its focus to his relatively early years, starting with his epic production of the film Hell’s Angels in the late 1920s, and taking the story through to his test flight of the “Spruce Goose” in the late 1940s. His loopy-as-an-airshow later years (in which he became one of the world’s most determined recluses) aren’t covered, although they are heavily foreshadowed: the film takes him from gregarious playboy to an obsessive eccentric. It’s a story filled with big name characters (Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Errol Flynn, Jean Harlow), and Scorsese’s reputation has secured a deep cast to give the film that old-fashioned big epic feel. In addition to Leonardo Di Caprio as Hughes and Cate Blanchett as Hepburn, the film features Alec Baldwin, John C Reilly, Jude Law, Alan Alda, Ian Holm, Kate Beckinsale, Edward Herrmann and Willem Dafoe in a range of often small parts.

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Buzzed

Film Film Reviews

Sideways (Alexander Payne, 2004)

Alexander Payne’s Sideways is a small, impeccably done character study that may just get crushed under the expectations that are surrounding it. It arrives in Australia swathed in Oscar and Golden Globes buzz, and with strong reviews from some notable critics (such as David Stratton’s 5 star rave on At the Movies). Inflated hopes are the enemy of a movie such as this: while a blockbuster action picture’s sheer mass gives it some resistance to hype, a picture as slight as Sideways can be left seeming diminished if the experience is anything less than transcendent. I was left slightly underwhelmed by Sideways, which is a shame, because the film itself did nothing wrong: it’s pretty much note-perfect, and deserves to be assessed without the burden of Awards hopes. While I’m sure Alexander Payne won’t want to send his Golden Globe for Best Picture back – the award was given while I was writing this review – but it may be that the film itself would have been more comfortable quietly finding its audience.

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