At the movies with Dan Slevin
BEST thing on at the moment is Martin Scorsese’s first “kids” film, Hugo. It is a gorgeous love letter to cinema, a plea for decent archives, a champion of the latest technology - all Marty’s current passions - but it’s also about something more, something universal. Hugo Cabret is a little orphan ragamuffin hiding in the walls of a great Paris railway station, winding the clocks and trying to repair a broken automaton that he believes contains a message from his dead father. While stealing parts from the station toy shop - and its sad and grumpy old owner - Hugo meets the old man’s god-daughter (Chloë Grace Moretz) and between them they try and unravel the mystery of the automaton and why Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley) is so unhappy.
Scorsese absolutely ‘gets’ 3D and uses it with skill and daring.
The screening I was at on Sunday evening got a round of applause - the only time I have experienced that outside of a festival screening.
On a similar theme - but with much poorer returns - Steven Spielberg’s War Horse tries to wring every possible tear out of each audience member. War Horse looks like the work of a director who has lost control of tone at the same time he’s gained control of everything else. It’s hard to believe that he made Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, let alone Jaws and Close Encounters.
Sherlock Holmes: a Game of Shadows took a while to get going but then did a fine job of keeping me invested in a plot that was satisfying and didn’t require endless repeated exposition. I’m up for a third and I’m sure you will be too.
Glenn Close in Albert Nobbs is the only female performance this holidays that can rival Streep’s tour de force as Margaret Thatcher - she plays a middle-aged woman who has masqueraded as a man her entire adult life in order to survive in tough 19th century Dublin. Sadly for the film as a whole, the character of Nobbs is too closed off for the audience to really get inside and feel much sympathy.
Viva Riva! is the first feature film to emerge from the fledgling Kinshasha film industry (in the Democratic Republic of Congo). It’s a story about petrol smuggling and small-time gangsters that appears to be plucked straight from the streets - but the execution owes rather too much to De Palma’s Scarface. It’s brutal and violent and predictable.
Also at the Paramount is The First Beautiful Thing which I hadn’t realised I had already seen until it was too late - it was the gala opening night film of last year’s Italian Film Festival. Still, it’s an effective tear-jerker of a family drama with plenty of romance and good characters.
We Bought a Zoo and Dolphin Tale are both Hollywood features about broken people being fixed by animals. In the first, Matt Damon’s writer-widower uproots his family and makes them live in a struggling safari park managed by Scarlet Johansson. In the second, another child with a dead parent learns to live again when he discovers an injured dolphin on a Florida beach and helps restore it with the help of Harry Connick Jr. and twinkly prosthetic limb engineer Morgan Freeman. Zoo displays all the craft - directed by the talented Cameron Crowe - but Dolphin Tale has the bigger ticker.
Anton Chekhov’s The Duel takes one of the Russian’s short stories and spins it out slowly over an agreeable hour and a half. You may want more to happen.
Finally, modern day Russia (actually The Duel is set in the Caucasus and filmed in Croatia) gets its very own alien invasion in the silly little thing, The Darkest Hour. Malevolent extra-terrestrials are intent on mining Earth for our minerals and wiping out the annoying carbon-based infestation that keeps getting in the way. A bunch of good-looking young people led by Emile Hirsch looking like River Phoenix, try and fight back.
It’s nice to see this sort of thing happen somewhere new - Moscow this time - and the final climactic battle takes place on a trolley bus which will please supporters of sustainable public transportation options, but the science is just ridiculous. Lessons learnt: Swedes are cowards, Australians are dumb, Russians are brave but selfish and women just need rescuing all the time.