Nesfarsit (Cristian Nemescu, 2007)

Released internationally as California Dreamin', this turns out as no great surprise to be a political pill on what the US means to other countries and what delusions those countries themselves harbour.
The basic set-up, a train of US military hardware bound for Kosovo being held up for days en route in a Romanian village by botched paperwork, is cursory enough and the timeframe strains credulity. This, however, is of little relevance since it's clear from the outset that here there be metaphors. Big ones.
What Nemescu finally has to say about the bludgeoning and blundering approach of the US to problems elsewhere, and the local repercussions of that approach, comes as no great revelation but the pleasure here is all in picking apart how the point is delivered. The obligatory American C-lister, Armand Assante, as the increasingly shirty captain of the marine detachment, a big teaky ham of an actor, is actually ideally cast here, and the run-of-the-mill plot elements - schoolgirls swooning over the visitors, corrupt officials, the conniving town mayor - all serve a higher purpose. It takes two and a half hours and makes full use of every minute, occasionally inserting magical realist ingredients (for instance, two budding lovers who have no common language give each other static shocks when they try to express something) as visual metaphors so inobtrusively they make perfect sense in the context.

7/10

What Just Happened (Barry Levinson, 2008)

Levinson made his mark as a director with box-office-friendly chowder like Good Morning, Vietnam and Rain Man back in the '80s, and has chugged along a similar middle-of-the road furrow since, so it's unsurprising that he's accumulated ample material for this lightly comic take on the film industry.
Robert De Niro stars as a producer on the wane having to deal with the usual mountains out of molehills built up by stars sending themselves up in cameos (most notably, Bruce Willis's primadonna) and the banal debris of his divorces. The ingredients are all the standard ones in Hollywood on Hollywood - backstabbing, shrinks, vanity, diet pills and pill diets - and the send-ups tame stuff after Extras (that De Niro also turned up on). But the handling of its topics is deft, and a couple of killer lines hit the spot unforcedly. Above all, it's palpably lacking in pretension, never purporting to offer revelations about the business, and so, like De Niro's character, the whole muddles on through amiably.

6/10

Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008)

Were it not accompanied by all the hype, this would slip by as a perfectly well-meaning escapist romance with a scattering of points to make on social inequality in India and some fairly obvious jabs at the gullibility of Western tourists, amongst other easy targets.
So why has Danny Boyle's latest grabbed the limelight to such a disproportionate extent, with Indian public figures railing against the pretty superficial depiction of slumlife at the bottom of the caste system and all manner of critics outside India falling over each other to heap praise? It's hardly radical fare: even if one considers the limited exposure Western audiences might have had to Indian social realism, the occasional work has got through: Bandit Queen, for example, which offered a far more coruscating depiction of the wounds running through Indian society.
This fairytale, on the other hand, of the street urchin who gets the money and the girl against all odds, is purely on its pedestal through its distribution and glossy Western director.
Anyway, on its own merits, it's attractively shot and zippily paced, with a pair of appealing young leads and an interestingly hybrid soundtrack. And that's about it. Nothing to put you off your popcorn, then.

6/10

A Prairie Home Companion (Robert Altman, 2006)

An independent within the studio system for his whole career, Altman bowed out fittingly with this elegiac piece on the passing of a heritage institution before the juggernauts of progress.
The institution in question is Garrison Keillor’s real-world radio music variety show, A Prairie Home Companion, which has run since 1974 from St Paul, Minnesota, purveying a sweetly homely concoction of folk and country forever stuck in yesteryear, complete with anachronistic ads for products long gone, if ever real at all.
It’s all as cosy as cocoa and slippers, and so too is Altman’s lovingly crafted mirror production, one of his trademark ensemble pieces where plot is hardly a priority and the entertainment is simply in letting characters bounce dialogue off each other, never far from improvisation. There’s a half-hearted stab at an intrigue sub-plot with Kevin Kline’s hammy private dick character wandering in and out, but for the most part the likes of Meryl Streep and Woody Harrelson just belt out tunes and reel off risqué jokes, and a good night is had by all. Altman at his best did this kind of thing so naturally, without forcing anything on the viewer. He’ll be missed.

7/10

Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog, 2007)

Herzog already filmed the story of German-American Vietnam POW Dieter Dengler some 10 years earlier as a documentary. Perhaps the doom-mongering auteur felt the pull of the jungle again, after torturing countless film crews through the wilds for decades in epics of the man vs. nature genre, most notably Aguirre, Wrath of God or Fitzcarraldo, both featuring his screen incarnation Klaus Kinski. And perhaps Herzog saw in Christian Bale's obsessive devotion to his roles, at least in terms of Method-bodily mortification (e.g. The Machinist), finally an actual Hollywood name who'd wrack himself to whatever extremes required in the name of authenticity.
It's a pity to have been in the same place in a fictional form with The Deer Hunter and to constantly have to remind oneself that this is the real deal. At least, for the most part, the way that the dialogue has been kept naturalistic and Dengler's character is given no enlightened or heroic polish for the sake of drama is effective and allows full immersion into the quandaries of the escape story. Odd, then that what actually shocks the most, after all the eating of live maggots and mental disintegration, is the gung-ho ending, as if pasted on from another movie.

5/10

It's a Free World... (Ken Loach, 2007)

...or the one in which Ken Loach notices we've got a new underclass doing all our menial jobs, beneath even the English working class. Unfair as that may be as a precis of the last output of one of our few cinematic documenters of society's harsher realities, you certainly know what you're going to get from just 'Loach' and 'illegal labourers'. That said, what follows is all soul-grindingly true to life and may have you making an effort to smile at those Ukrainians or Iranians trudging down your road for a change. For a few days.
Kierston Wareing leads as a recruiter who sets up on her own after losing her job, sending off all nationalities to no questions asked-jobs in factories and building sites from the back yard of a pub. This being Loach, it's always on the horizon that her irrepressible drive will overleap itself and corners will be cut. But it's to Wareing's credit, clearly having identified the core of the persona, that her character exceeds the brief of the tough-as-teak Essex girl and that the wearing down of her morals is entirely feasible.

6/10

Zavet (Emir Kusturica, 2007)

Kusturica is as much a brand in his way as the likes of Scorsese: you more or less know what contents to expect, and it's only the mix that varies from film to film. Hence, take lovably eccentric characters (be sure to always include roguish gangsters), blackly comic references to Serbian history and the West, a hectically jigging Balkan Gypsy soundtrack and add a hefty dose of magical realism. And shake, don't stir.
In Promise Me This, an ailing peasant sends his 14-year-old grandson off to the city to find himself a wife. There he becomes entangled with a band of bumbling mafiosi, smitten with a girl on a bike and taken in by a meatheaded double act of his steprelatives. Meanwhile, back on the farm, his grandfather devises increasingly complex Wallace and Gromity traps to frustrate a government inspector's amorous designs on the lusty local schoolmarm.
Unlike in the ribald tapestries of Kusturica's best work, such as Underground or Black Cat, White Cat, the mix here is too skewed towards wackiness for the mere sake of it (though mercifully short of the mark set in his execrable foray into the US in Arizona Dream) and rictus-grinning slapstick. The fantasy element of a human cannonball flying through scene after scene is just obtrusively mentally unhinged in a way reminiscent of the worst of Takashi Miike rather than transcendent. But Kusturica turbocharges the whole with so much gusto and vivacity that it's impossible to dislike and certainly never dull.

5/10

You Kill Me (John Dahl, 2007)

Ben Kingsley is cast as a hitman again, presumably purely for his utterly terrifying gangster Don Logan in Sexy Beast, only this time it's all played out for fun. The joke is that he can't keep off the sauce long enough to carry out his mob hits, and so gets shipped out unwillingly to attend AA meetings.
This scenario is such fertile soil for pitch-black humour that quite a while passes in anticipation before the realisation dawns that the writing is just too leaden to exploit all its possibilities. Kingsley wrings out what he can, but as his character's been gifted with no interesting personality traits apart from a disconcertingly po-faced directness, it's an uphill struggle.
Dahl spent a large part of the '90s revitalising the hard-edged film noir genre with lean minor classics such as The Last Seduction. Based on this bastard hybrid with comedy, he'd be best off going back there again. The love interest here makes no sense and it's hard to care who gets popped by the end. In a cinematic culture now completely inured to the actual horror of killing, the business of shooting people is just an incidental back story. So why have it at all?

4/10

Lust, Caution (Ang Lee, 2007)

After another American sojourn, the precociously chameleonic Ang Lee gets back to Chinese history, this time Shanghai under Japanese occupation in 1942. The Japanese hardly get a look in, however, as the main focus is squarely on a member of the underground (Wei Tang) detailed to lure a collaborator (Hong Kong stalwart Tony Leung), and the love story of sorts that develops between them.
Lee might be criticised from the outset for paying scant attention to the occupiers or the immense material hardships suffered by the bulk of the populace. But his interest is wholly the collapse of the resistance before the forces of fascism, only embodied by the crumbling of the emotional resistance of the honeypot before the cold self-preserving fury of the oppressor. Patriotic loyalty goes out of the window along with self-respect as she submits to effective rape and then surrenders her love, in a form of Stockholm syndrome.
The linking strand through most of Lee's films can be summarised as that of emotional self-denial, a struggle to maintain a front of propriety in the face of societal convention, while the character is assailed underneath by powerful urges. The moment of catharsis is when the effort to maintain the facade fails. And so too here, only that the central character of Wong Chia Chi flips her cover mid-course from passive collaborator to loyal resistance fighter, as the object of her passions is transposed. What's lacking is an explanation for the impetus behind this. One would hope the message is more than that all women love a bastard.

6/10

The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006)

The staggeringly vapid world of haute couture must be one of the few real environments populated by such caricatures that it's virtually impossible to satirise. Any successful attempt to do so must therefore go straight for the jugular, and under no circumstances be in love with its subject. Since the director of this piece of fluff has impeccable credentials in purveying feelgood materialist porn for girlies from Sex and the City, no less, there's little point in expecting anything more here than a few safe social observations on decency judiciously sprinkled on the gloss and grotesques, and The Devil Wears Prada certainly doesn't disappoint on that front. Anne Hathaway's perennially cute outsider to the fashion industry may rail at first and at the last against the superficiality of the business, but also gets to go to the best dos and wear an unfeasible number of nice outfits to boot, and is clearly happier for it.
Meanwhile Meryl Streep, as her vitriolic boss, phones in one of her haughty soulless harridans, a performance of undeniable fun but no depth. It's becoming hard to remember when Streep was actually called on to work in a role (Silkwood?).
Overall, the cake is had and eaten and no harm done to the real fashionistas, who turn up in their droves in cameos. It's all very much in the vein of the Hollywood indictments of prejudice against the poor which only ever end happily once the heroes have become astoundingly rich.

4/10