Enchanted (Kevin Lima, 2007)
Enchanted is the Disney corporation’s lavish tribute to the kind of films it has decided to stop making. Having assumed there was no longer a market for animated fairytales along the lines of its previous films Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast, it has instead filled the market void it created with an affectionate live-action retread of those films.
Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog, 2006)
Werner Herzog is notable as one of the few directors to earn a reputation as a genuinely A-grade filmmaker in both fiction and non-fiction formats. His latest feature, Rescue Dawn, sees him underline his strength in both fields by revisiting the subject of his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly as a conventional feature. The result is Rescue Dawn, which tells the true story of Dieter Dengler (played here by Christian Bale), a pilot shot down over Laos at the start of the Vietnam war. Dengler was captured and held in a POW camp, only to escape and flee into the jungle.
The film is one of Herzog’s most conventional films, but it is a solid effort nevertheless. Christian Bale revisits the territory of his debut film, Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, and anchors the film with a typically robust performance. He is supported by convincing portrayals of his fellow prisoners by Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies: imprisoned earlier than Dieter, they have long since given up hope of escape. Herzog is much more interested in the interaction between the men than he is in the usual mechanics of how to escape, and the focus on the way the prisoners’ imprisonment is psychological as much as physical is one of the film’s main points of difference with more traditional POW movies.