Keith

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WARNING: Major spoilers if you have not already watched this film


Rating 2½


Directed by Todd Kessler

Written by Todd Kessler and David Zabel, based on a short story by Ron Carlson

Starring Elisabeth Harnois (Natalie), Jesse McCartney (Keith), Ignacio Serricchio (Rafael), Margo Harshman (Brooke) and Michael McGrady (Pete), Jennifer Grey (Caroline), Michael O’Keefe (Alan), Ethan Phillips (Mr Miles), Eric Parker (Travis), Jessy Schram (Courtney), Micah Henson (Shane), Tabitha Brownstone (Cynthia) and Sam Murphy (Zach)


Natalie Anderson is a popular and conscientious high school student who routinely gets good grades. She plays tennis at competitive level and works hard to maintain her ranking inside the top twenty to guarantee a scholarship that will allow her to attend the prestigious Duke University after graduation. Her boyfriend is Rafael, a good-looking and athletic transfer student. When Natalie is assigned Keith, a glib under-achiever who rarely attends school, as her AP Chemistry partner, she slowly starts to question her life and aspirations – and her carefully ordered existence begins to unravel.

…


I tried watching ‘Keith’ a while ago and stopped after the first ten minutes or so, suspicious that the film would irritate me and suddenly less than convinced that I really wanted to watch it. I did try again and this time I made it through the whole of the film.

I wonder if Elisabeth Harnois, whose professional acting career dates back nearly 25 years to 1985, gets tired of seemingly always being cast in roles playing teenagers? Here, she is playing a seventeen-year-old high school student. Harnois may possibly have a limited acting range ( I am in no position to judge, although she does seems to play very similar roles, at least in the films and television series I have seen), but she does have a distinctive acting style and I like her very much. Jesse McCartney was a member of a boy band called Dream Street (who I had never heard of before looking it up) and more recently co-wrote the song ‘Bleeding Love’, which, when recorded by the singer Leona Lewis, became the second biggest selling US single release of 2008 and received a Grammy award nomination for Record of the Year.

So, what of the film itself? Natalie is popular. She has high expectations and is working hard to achieve her goals. At the start of the film we see her get up at 5am and go to the tennis courts to practice hitting balls before starting school. When we first encounter Keith he is playing pool with someone who, although not stated, is clearly a counsellor of some kind. Keith is egotistical and arrogant and announces that he plans to “have fun” with a girl at school. From the moment Natalie and Keith first meet in the chemistry lab it is clear that beneath the surface irritation she is already intrigued by him. However, it is somewhat difficult to understand why, because he simply comes across as being insufferably smug.

This set-up is very familiar and very formulaic. It quickly becomes clear that Natalie’s tennis and her school performance will suffer because of the time she spends with Keith and the seeds of doubt he starts to sow.

At the start of the film we see her practicing on the tennis courts and we then see her win a match, with her proud father there to take photographs. Afterwards, he tells her she is ranked fourteenth and we learn that she must stay inside the top twenty to gain the scholarship she needs. Later on, she is lying on her back on the court in the early morning gloom when she should be practicing and she loses a match, much to the concern of her parents and her boyfriend – both Rafael and her mother react with some anger to the defeat and she becomes defensive, dismissing its importance. Her mother and father tell her she has dropped down fifteen places in the rankings and without the scholarship it is no longer possible to attend Duke, but it is now too late to apply to other universities. By this stage, Natalie has already started to question her plans for the future, coming to realise that they are the aspirations of her parents, not hers. The father, as we have already learned, played football at school, but not to any great level of skill, and unsuccessfully applied to attend Duke after graduation. He now has job he doesn’t like and his real passion, photography, is a largely sidelined pastime.

Similarly, early on in the film we see Natalie confidently completing a school test/exam before everyone else, smiling as she hands in the paper and leaves the room early, whereas later on during another test she is now struggling to complete the paper, while all the other students around her successfully finish theirs.

Keith lies to Natalie about himself, creating a fantasy family of brothers and sisters. He disappears from school for weeks at a time. When she finally does track him down, having broken into his school locker in search of information and receiving a one week suspension as a consequence, she discovers that he is an only child living with his father, a mechanic. What Natalie does know is that Keith seems genuinely besotted with the old yellow truck he drives and that his one aspiration after graduation is to go to a classic truck festival in London, Ontario.

Although we do not learn the truth about Keith until very late in the film, it is easy to guess what is coming long before that. At the very beginning of the film it is clear that he has been receiving counselling, even if it is thinly disguised by the game of pool. Eventually, Natalie finds a bottle of pills, a morphine-based antidepressant, but this is no great revelation because by this time it is more than obvious that he has psychiatric problems. His fatalistic streak and refusal to admit to any future goals (other than the truck festival) makes it clear, even though we are not told so, that he can see no future. This is confirmed near to the end of the film when Natalie accidentally discovers that he has cancer, for which he has been receiving chemotherapy (explaining his constant absences from school). By this time, her perfectly ordered life has fallen apart, but the truth opens the final door that allows her to step into a new life, one of her own making.

The real life lesson here is, of course, learned by Keith rather than Natalie. He sets out to destroy her life out of malice, jealous that she has a perfectly mapped out future, while he, through cruel fate, has no future. However, she is stronger and more of a free spirit than he had imagined and there is one thing he does not plan for; he falls in love with her.

This is all fine and good and after the shaky first ten or fifteen minutes I did enjoy the film until the rather sickly-sweet and messy concluding scenes – Natalie in graduation robes, Natalie fitting a new carburettor in the yellow truck with the help of Keith’s father, Natalie driving the truck along a straight stretch of road in the direction of London, Ontario. The problem remains that everything is not only too neat, too easy to second-guess, but also rather hard to believe in and therefore hard to truly engage in. I got no sense that Natalie was stifled by her ordered existence or that this was genuinely forced on her against her will. Therefore, the ease with which Keith was able to manipulate her is not terribly credible. The film’s message becomes jumbled because there is nothing particularly wrong with the life Natalie has or the future she plans. There is some talk about the insincerity and snobbishness of her friends, but this doesn’t really come across – instead, we simply get a sense that the film represents a kind of jealous reaction to their relative privilege.

‘Keith’ plays out like a Lifetime television movie and there is nothing wrong with that, although I suspect it might aspire to more. There is nothing startlingly new here and the story joins all the dots in a very obvious way. Having said that, and perhaps contradicting my criticism of the film, it is well done.

Review posted 29 July 2009


Screencaps taken from elisabeth-online.com




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Cypher

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Rating 2¾


Directed by Vincenzo Natali

Written by Brian King

Jeremy Northam (Morgan Sullivan / Jack Thursby), Lucy Liu (Rita Foster), Nigel Bennett (Finster), Timothy Webber (Callaway), Kari Matchett (Diane Thursby), Kristina Nicoll (Amy Sullivan), David Hewlett (Virgil Dunn) and Peter Mensah (Vault Security)


Morgan Sullivan is an out-of-work accountant with a stifling suburban life and a wife who nags him about taking a job with her father. Instead, he gets involved in corporate espionage for “Digicorps” and is given an assumed name, Jack Thursby. Over time he starts to increasingly assume this identity to the point where the lines between reality and fantasy become more and more blurred. During his first assignment he encounters the mysterious Rita Foster and eventually begins to work as a double agent for “Sunway”, but he is warned that he is a pawn in a dangerous and deadly game being played by Sebastian Rooks, the enigmatic and shadowy boss and lover of Foster.

...


‘Cypher’ is a 2002 Canadian psychological sci-fi spy thriller. It has been compared to the work of the late cult science fiction writer Philip K Dick and I guess it might be described as “cyberpunk”, although I am a little unclear about some of these terms. It was directed by Vincenzo Natali, whose previous film, his debut full-length feature, was the cult 1997 sci-fi film ‘Cube’, which received a fair amount of critical attention, although the reviews were mixed.

Stylistically, ‘Cypher’ is quite similar to ‘Cube’ and quite clearly the product of a director with a recognisable signature style. Both films are, effectively, about nothing. There is no clearly defined back story or reason for the events that unfold. In ‘Cypher’ we do not know with any certainty what Digicorps or Sunway are. We do not know the nature of the espionage or what it is intended to achieve. We know very little about Morgan Sullivan and while we might assume to know why he wants to assume this new identity, the details are never clear to us. Everything is slightly surreal and off-kilter. Nothing looks quite right, nothing is quite as it should be, as if perhaps it is all a hallucinogenic dream.

The performance of English actor Jeremy Northam is equally eccentric, but also rather engaging. It certainly fits in with the pervading sense that nothing here is as it should be. I am not sure what American viewers would make of his American accent. It reminded me of something that I cannot quite put my finger on, but I was, for some reason, put in mind of Cary Grant in screwball comedies like ‘Bringing Up Baby’ and ‘Arsenic and Old Lace’.

The film is a little bit too stylised for my tastes. I would prefer more human emotion and drama and less technological wizardry and hi-tech hardware. However, that would somewhat negate the point of the film. I did rather enjoy it, although I cannot imagine feeling any great compulsion to watch it again in a hurry.

Jeremy Northam made his breakthrough in ‘Hamlet’ at the Royal National Theatre in London in 1989. His first American film was the ‘The Net’ in 1995. I seem to be one of the few fans of this much-maligned Sandra Bullock film. Lucy Liu is, I guess, best known for her role in the long-running television series ‘Ally McBeal’, a popular show that certainly divides opinion. I personally find it offensive and demeaning to women. Her film roles have included the two ‘Charlie’s Angels’ films and ‘Kill Bill: Vol 1’. Kari Matchett is an excellent Canadian actress, best known for her work in American television series like ‘Invasion’, ’24’ (season six), ‘Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip’ and ‘ER’ (season fourteen). She starred in ‘Cube 2: Hypercube’, which was not directed by Vincenzo Natali. She was also featured in seven episodes of Gene Roddenberry’s ‘Earth: Final Conflict’. Natali directed three episodes of that series, although they did not work together on it. Her role in ‘Cypher’ does not amount to very much.

‘Cypher’ has a 56% rating at Rotten Tomatoes from 16 reviews. It is also known as ‘Company Man’ and ‘Brainstorm’.

Review posted 28 July 2009



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Dollhouse: Briar Rose (season one, episode eleven)

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Rating 1½

Created by Joss Whedon

Written by Jane Espenson

Directed by Dwight Little

Starring Eliza Dushku (Echo), Olivia Williams (Adelle DeWitt), Fran Kranz (Topher Brink), Harry J Lennix (Boyd Langton), Amy Acker (Dr Claire Saunders), Tahmoh Penikett (Paul Ballard), Dichen Lachman (Sierra), Enver Gjokaj (Victor), Miracle Laurie (November), Liza Lapira (Ivy), Aisha Hinds (Loomis), Hannah Leigh Dworkin (Susan), Judith Moreland (Renee) and Alan Tudyk (Stephen Kepler)


Echo is imprinted to help a young girl called Susan who is in a foster care programme. Paul Ballard tells Mellie (aka November) that he is leaving and then follows her when she is taken back to the Dollhouse, finally discovering its location. He goes to Stephen Kepler, an environmental architect who worked on the building when it was first being designed for construction, and forces him to help to gain entry into the “invisible” underground portion of it. An encoded memory stick is delivered to the Dollhouse for Laurence Dominic. Victor is imprinted with his memories to obtain the password to open it. Adelle DeWitt had supposed it to be from the NSA, but it is actually from Alpha, the rogue Doll. Sierra is imprinted with the memories of an FBI forensics expert and dispatched to Tuscan to investigate further.

...


Oh good, another boring fight scene. This one is between Paul Ballard and Boyd Langton and takes place inside the Dollhouse after Ballard has gained entry into the supposedly super top secret establishment, achieving this extraordinary feat with next to no difficulty whatsoever. Perhaps they allowed it to happen, although I can think of no reason for this at the moment. I have to admit that I was paying very little attention during this episode, constantly unable to keep my attention from wandering elsewhere. I found the whole thing decidedly uninvolving.

The episode opens with a metaphor, providing a parallel between the fairytale ‘Briar Rose’ (the Brothers Grimm variant of ‘Sleeping Beauty’) and what we are about to witness. It is delivered in such a heavy-handed and leaden manner that it is tempting to assume it must be joke. In fact, the writers (or writer, if Jane Espenson, who wrote some excellent episodes of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, is responsible alone for this) clearly could not even be bothered to think of a credible reason why Echo would be imprinted to help the girl suffering from traumatic experiences in her short life. So we have the ludicrous and wholly unconvincing conceit that it is the altruistic endeavour of Topher Brink, approved and authorised by Adelle DeWitt. It is never explained what Echo’s qualifications are supposed to be or how she comes to be working / helping out in the young children's care unit.

There is a neat twist towards the end when we discover that Alpha has infiltrated the Dollhouse and we encounter him for the first time. It held my interest for about 20 seconds, but then I lost interest again, perhaps because by this stage I had become increasingly irritated by the performance of Alan Tudyk, who had previously been excellent in Joss Whedon’s short-lived but much loved television series ‘Firefly’. Tudyk is undoubtedly a very talented actor, but I didn’t enjoy his performance here at all, although perhaps it is a reaction to the episode itself rather than his acting.

In one of the early episodes, the third one I think, I had guessed that Claire Saunders, the Dollhouse doctor, would turn out to be a Doll. Although not yet confirmed, I suspect I am right. There is a moment in ‘Briar Rose’ when Victor (imprinted as Laurence Dominic) refers to her as Whiskey, although there is a horribly clumsy piece of writing that attempts to deflect attention away from this, or perhaps direct us to it.

There is now just one episode to go, not counting the unaired and allegedly superior pilot episode and / or the thirteenth episode, one that was not broadcast by the FOX network, but was commissioned, I think, specifically for the DVD box set. I do not have access to these two episodes and, such is my rather negative response to the episodes I have seen, I do not feel that I am missing out on anything.

Review posted 26 July 2009



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Eden Lake

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Rating 3


Written and directed by James Watkins

Kelly Reilly (Jenny), Michael Fassbender (Steve), Jack O’Connell (Brett), Thomas Gill (Ricky), Finn Atkins (Paige), Bronson Webb (Reece), Jumayn Hunter (Mark), Thomas Turgoose (Cooper), Shaun Dooley (Jon), James Gandhi (Adam)


Jenny, a nursery school teacher, is picked up by her boyfriend Steve after work on Friday to drive out to what she jokingly describes as a water-filled quarry and what he tells her is an idyllic rural spot next to a lake. The area is soon to be turned over to a development of new luxury houses and Steve wants to visit it one last time. They stay in a pub overnight, where there is a constant aura of aggression and children are allowed to run riot in the beer garden, their misbehaviour being met with violent punishment by their parents. The next morning Jenny and Steve reach “Eden Lake”, despite the area now being fenced off. Looking at a huge sign advertising the planned development of the area, Jenny notices that it is advertised as a ‘gated community’ and jokingly asks, “Who are they so afraid of?” Their romantic weekend camping out in the unspoilt wilderness is soon interrupted by a group of loud and threatening youths nearby. Steve confronts them and following more encounters with the same youths the situation escalates into sickening violence.

...


Anthony Quinn, writing in The Independent newspaper, concludes his review of ‘Eden Lake’ by saying, “Daily Mail scaremongering? Possibly. But formidably well made, all the same.” This is a reasonable summing up of a film that was generally very well received, particularly by British film critics. 23 reviews collected at Rotten Tomatoes result in an 83% fresh rating. The review headline in the Daily Mail reads “A great movie (if you can take it)” and the verdict is “an excellent British horror film.” Peter Bradshaw, writing in The Guardian, is particularly impressed, although he does write, “Eden Lake is hardly for everyone: and I certainly can’t claim to like it in any normal sense.” Not everyone is so enamoured of the film. In the Daily Telegraph, Tim Robey says it “served up silly levels of alarmist editorialising about kids today.”

All of these assessments are accurate. ‘Eden Lake’ is very well made and has a genuinely visceral impact. The film has been variously compared to ‘Deliverance’, ‘Straw Dogs’, ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’. The similarities to William Golding’s novel ‘Lord of the Flies’, which was first published in 1954, are obvious.

I found the film unrelentingly unpleasant, but it is very effective, if blatantly exploitative, and had me constantly questioning my own reaction to the events as they unfolded. Daniel Etherington, reviewing the film for Channel 4, called it “a sordid little nightmare of contemporary England,” writing that it “does play effectively on contemporary British fears. To be specific, the film’s monsters are Britain’s ‘feral youth’, the subject of sordid tabloid fear-mongering and liberal handwringing.”

Go out into any town centre in Britain on a Friday or Saturday night and it is possible to feel the pervading aura of threat and violence. Board any bus when “kids” are on their way to or from school and it is immediately apparent that they (meaning some of them) are very loud, very aggressive and constantly use foul language. But is this any different to the way it has always been? The short answer is no. As I get older, so I become more wary of “gangs of youths”, but it is thirty years or more since I was last on the receiving end of a genuine threat of violence. When I was a teenager in the 1970s I was the victim of violence more than once because of the length of my hair, or my clothes, or the fact that, in the opinion of my assailants, I was a “poof”. As a teenager I once ventured to go along to a football match at the Vicarage Road ground of Watford FC and spent the whole of the ninety minutes standing on the terraces terrified for my safety, such was the apparent threat of brutal violence breaking out at any moment. When I visited New York at the beginning of the 1980s I was given to believe that I would barely have stepped off the airplane before I became the inevitable victim of a mugging. In the event, I could not get over how much safer I felt walking the streets there than I ever did in London. The tabloids and the media generally would love us to think differently, as would politicians, at least those in opposition parties, but in my own experience, Britain, or at least London, is far less threatening and dangerous now than it was thirty or forty years ago.

Every so often the media will have a James Bulger case to pore over or another knife crime to get their teeth into. All sorts of reasons will be put forward to explain why crimes of this nature happen. We will be told about social exclusion (still one of the most heinous failings of this country) and declining educational standards. The right-wing press will probably try to blame “illegal immigrants”. The finger of blame might be pointed at “video nasties” or drugs. There does, however, seem to be a reluctance to fully blame the parents, unless of course one is talking about Conservative Party nonsense that would have us believe that all the ills of our society can be explained by “absent fathers”, a decline in the number of marriages and an increase in divorces. Clearly, if we are to believe this simplistic view, in single-parent home environments mothers are incapable of bringing up their children.

‘Eden Lake’ seems to be telling us that violence breeds violence, which is hardly something we should need to be reminded of, but probably do. Brett, the leader of the gang, uses threats of violence and violence itself to encourage his friends to engage in the increasingly disturbing campaign of violence against Jenny and Steve. His parents, when we encounter them, treat him in exactly the same way that he treats those around him. His father is outwardly aggressive and threatening and violent, a truly scary individual. Early on, before the violence really begins, we encounter one of the mothers, who jokingly refers to the kids “terrorising” Jenny and Steve, but whose expression then darkens as she repeats “not my kids” when Steve tries to press the point about the aggressive behaviour of the teenagers. This is entirely believable, but how society can successfully combat it is much less clear. Probably, I suspect, it cannot.

The one female member of the gang is not expected to actively engage in the violence, but she is required to watch it and film it on her mobile phone. Early on, or so it seems, we learn that she is at least as aggressive and threatening as the boys and throughout she seems desensitised to the violence she witnesses, until Brett really turns on his friends.

The film would also seem to be playing on the fears of urban dwellers that “country folk” are weird and savage, or that there is a “North / South” divide in England and that the further north one goes, the more savage and violent it becomes. I am not sure if writer and director James Watkins introduces this as a way of making us question our own reactions and prejudices, or whether it is simply a product of the underlying prejudice itself. I suspect the former. Are we meant to feel some degree of sympathy for Brett and the other kids, or at least understand how they could have come to this point where they are so readily prepared to engage in mindless acts of savage brutality? Brett goads the others into doing what they do and they do it out of a mixture of peer pressure, not wanting to lose face in front of their friends, and fear. Later on, how are we meant to react to what Jenny does when she becomes increasingly desperate, her face and body and clothes now covered in a mask of mud and blood?

Steve is a hot head. What are we meant to make of his willingness to confront the gang? I know that I would certainly not do this. He crosses a line when, early on in the film, seeing the BMX bikes of members of the gang outside a row of houses, he enters one of the houses through the open back door, even though there seems to be no one at home. This is a very effective and unsettling scene. When, at one point, Jenny tells him, “No Steve, it’s not worth it,” he replies, “If everyone said that, where would we be?” In his case, the answer quickly becomes obvious, because probably his Range Rover would not have been stolen and certainly he would not end up trussed up with barbed wire and have this tongue slashed with a Stanley knife.

‘Eden Lake’s is very well made. It’s effective and thought-provoking. It is also one of the most sickening and repellent films I think I have ever watched. The performances are very good – Kelly Reilly, for reasons I do not really understand, is an actress who manages somehow to impress me and irritate me in equal measure in almost everything I have seen her in. She always leaves an impression at least.

Review posted 26 July 2009



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Dollhouse: Haunted (season one, episode ten)

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Rating 1½

Created by Joss Whedon

Written by Jane Espenson, Maurissa Tancharoen and Jed Whedon

Directed by Elodie Keene

Starring Eliza Dushku (Echo), Olivia Williams (Adelle DeWitt), Fran Kranz (Topher Brink), Harry J Lennix (Boyd Langton), Tahmoh Penikett (Paul Ballard), Dichen Lachman (Sierra), Enver Gjokaj (Victor), Miracle Laurie (November), Ian Anthony Dale (Jack Dunston), Gregg Henry (William Bashford), Jordan Bridges (Nicolas Bashford), Aisha Hinds (Loomis) and Rhea Seehorn (Jocelyn Bashford)


When Margaret Bashford, a close friend of Adelle DeWitt, dies, apparently in a tragic riding accident, her memories are imprinted into Echo to allow her to visit her own funeral and, so it turns out, investigate her murder. Back in the Dollhouse, Topher Brink is allowed to imprint memories into Sierra, supposedly for an important test of the system, but actually to create a friend he can share his birthday with. Paul Ballard attempts to find out the real identity of November/Mellie, getting an old friend and colleague to run her fingerprints on the FBI database, but the record is wiped the moment it is accessed.

...


I was, there is no doubt, biased coming into this series, but I did try to keep an open mind. I suspect I am more biased now, simply because I don’t like it very much and perhaps because I think that, despite some unenthusiastic reviews early on, it has been critically over-rated, something of a trend with Joss Whedon’s post-Buffy work.

The story of Margaret Bashford returning to her palatial home and stables and discovering some unpleasant home truths about the way her two adult children think of her is so clichéd that it would be tempting to assume the writers had their tongues firmly in their cheeks if the whole thing were not so determinedly flat-footed. The murder mystery is taken straight out of an episode of ‘Murder, She Wrote’ or the ‘Father Dowling Mysteries’, without the silly but not dislikeable verve of those shows. I have come to the conclusion that the writers must have an ongoing bet to see which one of them can include the most boring and unrealistic fight scene in their episode(s).

I am fast losing interest in Paul Ballard, who is going through all kinds of two-dimensional angst because, now that he knows that Mellie is actually an Active of the Dollhouse, something that she doesn’t know, he is turning into a client of the Dollhouse by proxy. As for the storyline in this episode revolving around Topher, it wasn’t interesting and I wasn’t interested.

There have been episodes in this first season that I think are worse than ‘Haunted’ and there have been episodes that I found a whole lot more objectionable, but this was such a mediocre and uninspiring 45 minutes or so. I got nothing out of it at all – I couldn’t even build up the energy to dislike it. However, it was the first time I came away thinking that Eliza Dushku’s performance was detrimentally below-par, having previously thought that the criticism of her acting in ‘Dollhouse’ by some critics has been a little unfair.

Review posted 24 July 2009



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The Jane Austen Book Club

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Rating 2½


Directed by Robin Swicord

Written by Robin Swicord, based on the novel by Karen Jay Fowler

Kathy Baker (Bernadette), Maria Bello (Jocelyn), Hugh Dancy (Grigg Harris), Amy Brenneman (Silvia Avila), Maggie Grace (Allegra Avila), Emily Blunt (Prudie Drummond), Marc Blucas (Dean Drummond), Jimmy Smits (Daniel Aliva), Kevin Zegers (Trey), Lyn Redgrave (Mama Sky), Nancy Travis (Cat), Parisa Fitz-Henley (Corinne), Gwendoline Yeo (Dr Samantha Yip) and Miguel Nájera (Señor Obando)


When Bernadette, who has been married and divorced six times, meets Prudie, a young and somewhat priggish French teacher, at a Jane Austen film festival, she decides they should form a book club devoted exclusively to Jane Austen, with one member for each of Austen’s six novels. She chooses her friends Jocelyn and Silvia – and Silvia’s daughter Allegra, initially coming along with some reluctance, simply to support her mother, who is still coming to terms with the breakdown of her marriage. Hopes that Silvia’s husband Daniel would be the sixth member of the group are dashed when they separate, but Jocelyn brings Grigg, an enthusiastic science fiction fan, to the first meeting, hoping to hook him up with Sylvia. Grigg agrees to read Jane Austen if Jocelyn will, in turn, read the science fiction author Ursula K Le Guin. With each book, the lives and loves of the six members of the club seem to increasingly match those of various characters and stories.

...


Karen Jay Fowler is an author who, prior to the publication of her 2004 novel ‘The Jane Austen Book Club’, was best known for writing science fiction and fantasy with a slant towards feminism. ‘The Jane Austen Book Club’ incorporates the sci-fi theme through the character Grigg Harris, who Jocelyn first encounters in a hotel where a Buffy the Vampire Slayer convention is taking place. The previous writing credits of Robin Swicord, who directed the film and wrote the screenplay, include the films ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’, ‘Matilda’ and ‘Practical Magic’, a film that is often derided, but which I like very much.

It was the cast, including Maggie Grace, Marc Blucas and Nancy Travis, all of whom I like a lot, that first pricked my interest in watching this film. I am not unfamiliar with the work of Jane Austen, having read the six novels more than twenty-five years ago, and having seen various film and television adaptations. At least twice in the film reference is made to film adaptations of the novels being no substitute for the real thing, which holds a kind of irony somehow.

The film is very nicely put together and the acting, as might be expected, is excellent. It is an expertly crafted ensemble piece. Of course, it is very contrived and thinking about it afterwards, I have found myself becoming slightly irritated at the memory, more than anything else. While I was watching the film I was struck by the very artificial nature of the dialogue. Do people really conduct conversations like this? Within the constructs and confines of a book club gathering, perhaps, but surely not otherwise.

Prudie is, perhaps, the character I struggled most to understand. She is trapped in an unhappy marriage, not because she and Dean do not love each other, but, so it seems, simply because they have different intellectual needs. Dean is a sports fan who does not read books. Prudie obsesses on a student at the school where she teaches, a good looking boy who is playing the lead role in a school play, and appears to be heading towards having an affair with him. The suggestion that, when it seems their marriage has hit rock bottom and there is no way back, it simply takes Dean reading ‘Persuasion’ in one single all-night session, while Prudie sleeps in his arms, to put everything right, is more far-fetched than any of the science fiction referenced in the film.

It also seems a little odd that Prudie, a scholar of French language, who randomly throws rather pretentious sentences spoken in French into her conversations, and, judging by her appearance, is a follower of French fashion and style, has never been to France, but I guess that is not entirely beyond the realms of possibility.

I am not sure exactly how to interpret the reason for Allegra’s attraction to extreme pursuits (skydiving, wall climbing), usually resulting in injuries requiring hospitalisation, and how, or so it would seem from the way it is presented to us in the film, this relates to the fact that she is a lesbian. What did work very well was her initial barely concealed antipathy towards Prudie and her exasperation at Prudie’s decidely neurotic and precious manner. I am surprised that we don’t see more of Maggie Grace, whose performance here extends beyond the wounded vulnerability that was her stock-in-trade in the television series ‘Lost’ and in the remake of ‘The Fog’.

Jocelyn attempts to play matchmaker and bring Grigg and Sylvia together, despite the fact that it is blatantly obviously from the very first moment they meet that Grigg is strongly attracted to her, something that we seem to be required to believe she doesn’t notice. Grigg thinks she is trying to hook him up with Allegra, something that confuses him even more when he discovers that Allegra is a lesbian. I have no idea how he could possibly have come to this conclusion. Eventually, Jocelyn becomes jealous of the attention she thinks Grigg is giving to Sylvia and she and Grigg spend the book club gatherings sniping at one another. It was, I thought, a little over-cooked and heavy-handed.

These criticisms aside, it was a very enjoyable film. However, the ending was far too neatly sugary and sentimental for me and for that I have lowered my rating from a three to two-an-a-half.

Each of the main six characters in the film is related to one of the six novels. Allegra is ‘Sense and Sensibility’; Bernadette is ‘Pride and Prejudice’; Grigg is ‘Northanger Abbey’ (which is my favourite book of the six); Jocelyn is ‘Emma’; Prudie is ‘Mansfied Park’; Sylvia is ‘Persuasion’. Although I think they can each be related to more than one character and more than one book, Allegra is principally Marianne in ‘Sense and Sensibility’, Bernadette is Mrs Gardiner in ‘Pride and Prejudice’, Jocelyn is the title character in ‘Emma’, Prudie is Anne Elliot in ‘Persuasion’ and Sylvia is Fanny Price in ‘Mansfield Park’. Grigg is an amalgamation of several male characters in the books.

‘The Jane Austen Book Club’ has a 65% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes from 109 reviews. The reviews, although more favourable than not, were mixed. Tim Robey, reviewing the film for the Daily Telegraph newspaper, thought it, “Offers a distinctive vision of Hell – a plane of being where there are only six novels that matter, and they’re consulted like all-purpose agony aunts. There’s no relationship crisis in this ensemble comedy-drama that Jane can’t solve, if you buy into the film’s therapeutic brand of chick-lit-crit.”

The film had a worldwide box office gross a little over $7 million.

Review posted 24 July 2009



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Midsomer Murders: The Dogleg Murders

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Rating 2½


Created and produced by Brian True-May, based on the books by Caroline Graham

Episode directed by Richard Holthouse

Episode written by Andrew Payne

Starring John Nettles (DCI Tom Barnaby), Jason Hughes (DS Ben Jones), Jane Wymark (Joyce Barnaby), Barry Jackson (Dr George Bullard), Nicholas Day (Martin Crisp), Maggie Ollerenshaw (Eileen Fountain), Jamie Belman (Darren Fountain), Luke Neal (Colin Fountain), John Standing (Will Tunstall), Holly Gilbert (Becky Tunstall), Nicholas Le Prevost (Jerry Drinkwater), Graham Seed (Miles Tully), Hugh Ross (Ed Monkberry), Geoffrey Hutchings (Harry Claypole), Peter-Hugo Daly (Archie Kemp), Lin Blakley (Jane Painter), Michael Keating (Derek Painter), Robert Perkins (Clyde Patchett), Kirsty Dillon (WPC Gail Stephens), Nick Fletcher (CS John Cotton), Alison Skilbeck (Sarah Kingslake) and Rupert Vansittart (Alastair Kingslake)


When Alastair Kingslake is bludgeoned to death with a golf club on the dogleg of the notorious “Crisp’s Folly” 13th hole at the Whiteoaks golf club, suspicion points at one of his playing partners, Jerry Drinkwater, with whom he had a £1,000 bet who would win the hole. Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby is faced with entrenched class snobbery when he begins his investigation and after a second murder is committed he uncovers evidence of rife illegal gambling taking place at the club.

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‘Midsomer Murders’ is a British television institution. It began with the pilot episode ‘The Killings at Badger’s Drift’, based on the 1987 novel of the same name by the author Caroline Graham and first broadcast on ITV on 23 March 1997. ‘The Dogleg Murders’ is the sixty-sixth episode and the first of the twelfth season. This season will consist of four two-hour episodes. John Nettles, who has played the lead role of the sleepy police detective Tom Barnaby since the beginning, has announced that he will leave the show following completion of the thirteenth season. Whether it will continue after that is not known, although the genial and deceptively charismatic Nettles would certainly be a hard act to follow.

In his pocket preview of ‘The Dogleg Murders’ in The Guardian newspaper, Will Dean said of ‘Midsomer Murders’ that, “It trundles along like a TV version of Xanax, two hours of murder mystery with a tranquilising effect to take the edge off. Now in its 12th season, it’s proved an enduringly popular sedative.” This sums up the series rather well. Hard hitting it is not, but that is a big part of its appeal. As time has gone by it has settled comfortably into increasingly ludicrous plots, with a knowing twinkle in its eye.

‘The Dogleg Murders’ offers nothing new and there really isn’t a lot to be said about it, but it is all reassuringly familiar. It might leave no powerful lasting impression, but Tom Barnaby is going to be missed when John Nettles says goodbye to the role.

Review posted 23 July 2009



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Freeze Frame

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Rating 2½


Written and directed by John Simpson

Starring Lee Evans (Sean Veil), Rachael Stirling (Katie Carter), Ian McNeice (Paul Sager), Sean McGinley (Detective Louis Emeric), Colin Salmon (Detective Mountjoy), Rachel O’Riordan (Mary Shaw) and Andrew Wilson (covert cameraman)


Ten years after he was cleared of the brutal murder of a woman and her two young twin daughters, Sean Veil suffers from extreme paranoia and films every moment of his life to provide him with a constant alibi, maintaining a huge library of camcorder tapes in an secure underground location. Louis Emeric, the police detective who investigated the murders, remains convinced that Veil was guilty and, knowing that illness is going to foreshorten his own life, he is obsessed with bringing his suspect to justice before he dies. The forensic pathologist assigned to the case, Paul Sager, has since become a celebrity author of books on forensic profiling and continues to maintain that Veil was guilty, despite the verdict to the contrary. Investigative reporter Katie Carter, however, thinks he is innocent and attempts to gain his trust.

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‘Freeze Frame’ is a 2004 psychological thriller, set in an unspecified location in England, but filmed in Belfast in Northern Ireland, primarily at the now derelict HMP Belfast, more commonly known as Crumlin Road Gaol. Writer and director John Simpson has subsequently directed one further film, the critically slated 2009 direct-to-DVD horror ‘Amusement’.

The popular British stand-up comedian Lee Evans stars in his first non-comic acting role as the paranoid and ambiguous Sean Veil. I don’t really like Evans as a stand-up comedian and rarely find his frenetic take on Norman Wisdom remotely funny, even though he is highly respected (Evans himself claims that Norman Wisdom is not an influence, although the comparison is frequently made). His film appearances have tended to be along these same lines, but not here, where he is surprisingly effective.

The film draws on modern day surveillance techniques, incorporating this into the general theme of paranoia and the suggestion that we live in a world in which “Big Brother” is always watching us, but we cannot be sure that we can trust what we see and how we interpret what we see. Veil claims his innocence, but his behaviour is peculiar and makes us suspicious of him. Emeric is obsessed with bringing Veil to justice, irrespective whether he is guilty or innocent, and his own behaviour is, if anything, even more bizarre than that of Veil. Sager is more concerned with his celebrity status and maintaining his success and wealth than anything else. Katie Carter’s true motivation is less than crystal clear. Everything becomes blurred and it is constantly uncertain where the truth ends and the lies begin. I was often put in mind of Franz Kafka’s novel ‘The Trial’, although the two stories are really not really similar.

A decent job, generally, is made on what is clearly a very small budget and a persuasive sense of claustrophobia is built up. Having said this, I wasn’t emotionally engaged in the story, finding it interesting, but at the same time sometimes bordering on tedious. I also felt that it degenerated into a rather histrionic climax.

Six reviews are collected at Rotten Tomatoes, where the film is given an 83% fresh rating.

Review posted 23 July 2007



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Sunshine Cleaning

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Rating 3


Directed by Christine Jeffs

Written by Megan Holley

Starring Amy Adams (Rose Lorkowski), Emily Blunt (Norah Lorkowski), Alan Arkin (Joe Lorkowski), Jason Spevack (Oscar Lorkowski), Clifton Collins Jr (Winston), Steve Zahn (Mac), Amy Redford (Heather) and Mary Lynn Rajskub (Lynn)


Rose Lorkowski was a popular cheerleader who dated the football team’s star quarterback at high school. Now she is a single mother, who works as a maid and cleans houses for a living. Her younger sister Norah refuses to take self-responsibility and lives at home with their father, Joe, a salesman with a history of failed get-rich-quick schemes. She has recently been fired from her job as a waitress. Their mother, an aspiring actress, committed suicide when they were both very young. Rose has a young son, Oscar, who is very bright, but is failed by the inadequacies of his school and reacts with behaviour that they deem to be anti-social.

Rose is having an affair with a married police detective, who tells her about the crime scene clean-up business, saying it would be a lucrative business to get into. She persuades her sister to join her in the enterprise and cleaning up the scenes of often violent death proves to be both a life-changing and life-affirming experience.

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‘Sunshine Cleaning’ is a small budget independent film directed by the New Zealand film director Christine Jeffs, who’s previous film, ‘Sylvia’, the story of the American poet Sylvia Plath, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig, was released in 2003. This new film was written by first-time writer Megan Holley, the director of a 2002 indie film called ‘The Snowflake Crusade’, starring ‘The L Word’ actress Leisha Hailey. ‘Sunshine Cleaning’ was first screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2008 and received a limited theatrical release in the UK at the end of June 2009.

It has been observed by several films critics that ‘Sunshine Cleaning’ is a blatant and unsubtle attempt to cash-in on the success of ‘Little Miss Sunshine’, the 2006 film that grossed in excess of $100 million at the box office worldwide against a production budget of just $8 million and received four Academy Award nominations, including two wins. One of those wins was for Alan Arkin (Best Supporting Actor), who is also featured in ‘Sunshine Cleaning’. I was a little bit underwhelmed by ‘Little Miss Sunshine’, perhaps because of the hype, and probably enjoyed ‘Sunshine Cleaning’ more.

There would appear to be a general school of thought when approaching the critique of films that all non-English language films are automatically superior to American films – and independent American films are automatically superior to mainstream American films. This is, of course, nonsense. Indie films are, frequently, just as formulaic as mainstream films. ‘Sunshine Cleaning’ is a case in point. It is very obvious how the story is going to play out and it is also very manipulative – for example, the scene in which Rose and Norah go to the house where an elderly man has committed suicide and they are met by his wife, who is waiting for them with the keys. It does work, and very well, but it is not subtle and it is not especially inventive. This is just one of many examples – the silliest, surely, coming when Rose notices the film on television is the one her mother had appeared in so many years earlier, a film neither she nor her sister had ever previously seen – and it just happens to be the single, very brief, scene in which their mother appears. This is straight out of a Lifetime movie.

The film is too neat, too overly sugary and sentimental, and entirely divorced from anything approaching realism. Ultimately, though, what saves it is that, allowing that it is all a bit shallow and calculating, it is nicely written, the characters are likeable, and there are a couple of wonderful performances by Emily Blunt (who put me in mind of a less spiky, less volatile Juliette Lewis) and, in particular, Amy Adams.

Adams has proved herself to be one of America’s most talented film actresses and has received considerable praise since her breakthrough role in ‘Junebug’ in 2005, after several years of professional acting. She has received two best supporting actress Academy Award nominations, for the aforementioned ‘Junebug’ and for ‘Doubt’ in 2008. Bucking the trend, the film critic David Thomson recently wrote a rather extraordinary piece in The Guardian, in which he suggested that Adams is a pleasant but undistinguished actress of rather mediocre ability, who is only praised because she is unthreatening, and that she should make the most of her unwarranted success while it lasts because by the time she is 4o she will look like a “pudding”. I would strongly disagree with this view, which does seem to have a real streak of vindictiveness about it. It is perhaps worth remembering that a few years ago Thomson, a film critic of great repute, wrote a book about Nicole Kidman in which he eulogised about her “gingery pubic hair” and “very pretty bare bottom”.

‘Sunshine Cleaning’ has a 73% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes from 141 reviews.

Review posted 22 July 2009



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Dollhouse: Spy in the House of Love (season one, episode nine)

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WARNING: Some spoilers

Rating 1¾

Created by Joss Whedon

Written by Andrew Chambliss

Directed by David Solomon

Starring Eliza Dushku (Echo), Olivia Williams (Adelle DeWitt), Fran Kranz (Topher Brink), Harry J Lennix (Boyd Langton), Reed Diamond (Laurence Dominic), Amy Acker (Dr Claire Saunders), Tahmoh Penikett (Paul Ballard), Dichen Lachman (Sierra), Enver Gjokaj (Victor), Miracle Laurie (November), Valerie Cruz (Selena Ramirez) and Liza Lapira (Ivy)


Adelle DeWitt, who heads up the Dollhouse, says she has been called to headquarters and leaves Laurence Dominic, the head of security, in charge in her absence. Victor is programme and dispatched from the Dollhouse on a regular “Lonely Hearts” assignment, even though Dr Claire Saunders has warned about repeatedly programming the Dolls with the same imprints, but the client is not who the Dollhouse think it is. November is reprogrammed as Mellie and returned to Paul Ballard, the former FBI agent on the trail of the Dollhouse. She has been secretly imprinted with a secondary programme and tells Ballard that she is an Active in the Dollhouse. Topher Brink discovers a small micro-chip in his elaborate equipment that could be used to corrupt and change the programming of the Dolls. He is unable to contact DeWitt and reports his findings to Dominic. Sierra is programmed to infiltrate the National Security Agency (NSA) building to obtain evidence of the identity of the spy. Echo once more shows signs of an evolving state by asking Topher to be programmed so that she can help, which allows her to reveal who the spy is.

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Having decided that, despite some fairly major reservations, I was going to watch the whole of the first season of ‘Dollhouse’, there has been a gap of thirty days between episodes eight and nine, not because I wasn’t able to spare the time to watch this next episode, but simply because I could not build up any enthusiasm to do so. This isn’t a good thing and is more evidence that, whatever the quality and merits of the show, I am just not enjoying it very much. Episodes seven and eight had suggested definite improvement, but despite a few interesting moments, I found this latest episode extremely annoying and I had originally considered giving it a rating lower than the one I finally went with.

The episode opens with Echo returning from an assignment as a dominatrix. There is some fairly uninspired, unenlightening and unpersuasive talk about love and pain being the same thing and I rather suspect we are intended to read some kind of quasi-feminist subtext in here somewhere. To me, it just played out as nothing more than a lame excuse to have Eliza Dushku dressed up in bondage gear. Things do improve with the events unfolding inside the Dollhouse, but equally they continue to go downhill outside of it. I found the super-spy/espionage sequence when Sierra infiltrates the NSA building utterly awful. It was clichéd and silly and had all the suspense and excitement of being slapped in the face with a wet haddock. Even more tedious than this was the fencing match between Adelle DeWitt and Victor (programmed as “Roger”, some kind of super-smooth lover with a decidedly dodgy English accent – at least, I think it was supposed to be English). My finger was hovering over the off button on the remote. Undoubtedly, the revelation that DeWitt is secretly a client of the Dollhouse was supposed to surprise us and these scenes, in which she displays more emotion and feelings than her usual icily calculating and reserved manner, were intended to add more layers to her character. I guess I don’t care enough, because I didn’t register any surprise and it didn’t interest me.

The silliest moment is kept back until the very end when DeWitt is shot in her lower left side and acts as if she has just received a barely noticeably paper cut. A few stitches later, without an anaesthetic, she is perfectly fine again. If it turns out that she is, in fact, some kind of synthetic cyberbot this will explain it!

The structure of this episode, moving back and forth within the story and slowly revealing the imprints of the various Dolls, each one in turn but not necessarily in sequence, felt more hackneyed than clever to me, although I am sure it was supposed to be the other way around. It is executed with some skill and there is quality here, but nowhere near as much inventiveness as it would like to think – or like us to think.

Review posted 21 July 2009



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The Uninvited

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Rating 2¾


Directed by the Guard Brothers (Charles Guard and Thomas Guard)

Written by Craig Rosenberg, Doug Miro and Carlo Bernard, based on the film ‘Janghwa, Hongryeon’ written by Ji-woon Kim

Starring Emily Browning (Anna Rydell), Arielle Kebbel (Alex Rydell), Elizabeth Banks (Rachel Somers), David Strathairn (Steven Rydell), Maya Massar (Lillian Rydell), Jesse Moss (Matt), Dean Paul Gibson (Dr Siberling), Heather Doerksen (Mildred Kemp), Lex Burnham (Iris Wright) and Kevin McNulty (Sheriff Emery)


Anna Rydell has been confined in a psychiatric hospital, suffering from a psychological breakdown, since the death of her mother Lillian in an explosion ten months earlier. Her mother had been suffering from a serious illness that left her bed-ridden. She is told by her psychiatrist that her treatment has been taken as far as it can go and she can now return home. She is collected by her novelist father, Steven, and driven back to the idyllic family home, set on a hill above the coastline. Ecstatic to be reunited with her older sister Alex, she is much less happy to see Rachel Somers, who had been her mother’s nurse, but is now living with her father. Anna and Alex are convinced that Rachel was responsible for their mother’s death and now intends to get rid of them as well. Anna also has dreams about a young girl and starts to have hallucinations, in which she believes the child is trying to tell her something about Rachel’s past.

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‘The Uninvited’ is a 2009 psychological horror film from DreamWorks, the American film studio founded by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. Based on the acclaimed 2003 South Korean film ‘Janghwa, Hongryeon’ (A Tale of Two Sisters), the rights were bought by the English directing team the Guard Brothers (Charles and Thomas), who had been part of the Footlights dramatic society when studying at Cambridge and were previously best known for directing television and film commercials.

This is a horror film in the style of ‘What Lies Beneath’ and ‘Hide and Seek’ and is not specifically targeted at the usual teenage horror film market. The cast includes the respected veteran character actor David Strathairn, who was Academy Award-nominated for his lead role in the 2005 George Clooney-directed ‘Good Night and Good Luck’. Elizabeth Banks has established a very successful film career over the last ten years and I have been impressed by Arielle Kebbel in various films, irrespective of the quality of those films. She is a likeable actress with some genuine degree of screen presence. I had previously seen the elfin 20-year-old Australian actress Emily Browning as a young teenager in the films ‘Ghost Ship’ and ‘Darkness Falls’.

I do like psychological thrillers of this type and this is a reasonably good one, although not without its flaws. The Elizabeth Banks character is intended to be ambiguous. Is she a gold digger? Is she the archetypical evil step-mother? If she is either of these things, does that necessarily mean that she is a killer? Did she really cause the explosion that killed Lillian Rydell? This is tried and tested territory, but I could not help but think that Rachel quickly becomes far too two-dimensional. She is a one-note character and the ambiguity is soon lost. To a degree this plays to the advantage of the inevitable twist in the story, but it still feels somewhat heavy-handed. Banks has stated that she based her performance on that of Rebecca De Mornay in the 1992 film ‘The Hand that Rocks the Cradle’. This is fine, but Peyton Flanders, the character played by De Mornay in that film, is clearly unhinged, whereas we are supposed to be uncertain about Rachel.

These criticisms aside, I did enjoy the film, although perhaps more for the cast than for its overall quality. The film does have the obviously glossy look of top quality production values, but it is quite formulaic and there is certainly no new ground broken here, although it moves along at a nice pace. It rather put me in mind of the direct-to-DVD 2006 film ‘Ring Around the Rosie’, which itself was clearly influenced by Japanese and South Korean horror films.

‘The Uninvited’ has a 31% rotten rating at Rotten Tomatoes from 131 reviews. Irrespective of whether or not the generally negative reviews are warranted, there is no doubt that it suffers by being compared to the highly praised South Korean original, which has an 87% fresh rating from 52 reviews. The American remake performed with mediocre (although not desperately poor) results at the box office and has a worldwide gross a little under $38 million.

Review posted 17 July 2009



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Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

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Rating 2¼


Directed by Mike Newell

Written by Steve Kloves, based on the novel by J K Rowling

Starring Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter), Emma Watson (Hermione Granger), Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley), Michael Gambon (Albus Dumbledore), Maggie Smith (Minerva McGonagall), Alan Rickman (Severus Snape), Robbie Coltrane (Rubeus Hagrid), Ralph Fiennes (Lord Voldemort), David Tennant (Barty Crouch Junior), Brendan Gleeson (Alastor ‘Mad Eye’ Moody), Robert Hardy (Cornelius Fudge), David Lloyd Pack (Barty Crouch), Timothy Spall (Peter Pettigrew / Wormtail), Jason Isaacs (Lucius Malfoy), Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy), Matthew Lewis (Neville Longbottom), Warwick Davis (Filius Flitwick), Mark Williams (Arthur Weasley), Julie Walters (Molly Weasley), Bonnie Wright (Ginny Weasley), James Phelps (Fred Weasley), Oliver Phelps (George Weasley), Robert Pattinson (Cedric Diggory), Stanislav Ianevski (Viktor Krum), Clémence Poésy (Fleur Delacour), Katie Leung (Cho Chang), Frances de la Tour (Madame Olympe Maxime), Miranda Richardson (Rita Skeeter), David Bradley (Argus Filch), Shirley Henderson (Moaning Myrtle) and Eric Sykes (Frank Bryce)


An old gardener called Frank Bryce disturbs Lord Voldemort, Peter Pettigrew and an unnamed figure and is killed. Harry goes with the Weasley family and Hermione to the Quidditch World Cup, but the camp in which they are staying is attacked by mysterious hooded figures. Barty Crouch of the Ministry of Magic accuses Harry, Hermione and Ron of conjuring up a Dark Mark. Hogwarts School is hosting the Triwizard Tournament, in which a wizard from Hogwarts competes with wizards from two rival schools to complete three dangerous tasks. The goblet of fire chooses the competitors, a decision that cannot be reversed afterwards, and selects a fourth name, Harry Potter, even though he is too young to compete. Albus Dumbledore asks Alastor ‘Mad Eye’ Moody, the new professor of the Defence against the Dark Arts, to watch over Harry. Harry does compete in the tournament, briefly becoming estranged from his best friend Ron, but there are dark forces at work and he must face up to Voldemort.

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‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’ is the fourth book and film in the series. I enjoyed the third film quite a lot more than the first two, something that might be down to the change of director from Chris Columbus to Alfonso Cuarón, the Academy Award-nominated Mexican director, screenwriter and producer who gave ‘The Prisoner of Azkaban’ a noticeably darker edge than the previous two films. ‘The Goblet of Fire’ marks another change of director to Mike Newell, the first English director to work on the films. His previous credits include ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’, ‘Donnie Brasco’ and ‘Mona Lisa Smile’. Cuarón had faced some criticism for his approach to the third film and it does have the lowest box office gross of the five films to date, although J K Rowling is said to consider it her favourite instalment in the film series and he did apparently express an interest in directing another Harry Potter film. I think it’s a shame that he was not on board for ‘The Goblet of Fire’, which is a definite step backwards in many ways and, I thought, very messy and unfocused in places. Newell has talked about the problem of compressing the book into a coherent film and a number of key scenes from the book were cut during this process.

The first thirty minutes or so disappointed me greatly, but once the triwizard challenges begin it does pick up a little bit, although Brendon Gleeson’s “Mad Eye” Moody, who plays a central role here, proves to be a strangely disappointing character much of the time. The story deals with puberty and the fact that Harry, Hermione and Ron are now growing up. Harry and Ron are faced with the challenge of finding dates for the traditional Yule Ball. Harry finally builds up the courage to ask Cho Chang, but leaves it too late, even though she had clearly been waiting for him to ask. In the end she has said yes to another offer. Ron refuses to believe Hermione when he clumsily asks her and she turns him down, saying she already has a date. At the ball itself she becomes very upset, shouting at him that he has ruined everything because it took him so long to ask her, by which time she had accepted another offer. All three end up having a miserable time, in stark contrast to the usually hapless Neville Longbottom, another student from Gryffindor, who has a splendid time.

I found the climactic confrontation between Harry and Voldemort decidedly underwhelming, perhaps not helped because the preceding scenes in the magical maze, which should and could have been so much better, are ruined by being shot in virtually complete darkness. These scenes should be creepy and unsettling, but I just ended up squinting at my television screen, trying to make out what was going on. The film then ends on an unexpectedly low key note, as Hermione observes that nothing will ever be the same again.

Albus Dumbledore, the aged and wise headmaster of Hogwarts, had been played by Richard Harris in the first two films. His health was in sharp decline by the time of ‘The Chamber of Secrets’ and he apparently only reprised the role because his ten-year-old granddaughter refused to ever speak to him again if he did not. Harris died on 25 October 2002 from Hodgkin’s disease, his death coming before ‘The Chamber of Secrets’ had opened in cinemas in America. Michael Gambon, another acclaimed Irish actor, assumed the role of Dumbledore from the third film onwards. Gambon deliberately approached the role from a different angle so that his interpretation of Dumbledore is quite different to that of Harris. I think I prefer the Harris interpretation.

‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’ has an 88% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes from 213 reviews. It had a whopping production budget of $150 million and grossed nearly $896 million at the box office worldwide, the highest gross since the first film.

Review posted 16 July 2009



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