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Shattered Glass
Dir: Billy Ray
Cast: Hayden Christensen, Peter Saarsgaard, Chloe Sevigny, Hank
Azaria
Shattered Glass arrives at a time when both veteran
hacks and star reporters alike have been exposed in fabricating
stories, inventing quotes and generally betraying the cornerstone
on which their trade is based - integrity.
Stephen Glass, 24-year-old reporter at the influential political
magazine, The New Republic, is of the star reporter ilk. He freelances
with trendy magazines like Rolling Stone, derives gain by flirting
with secretaries and distinguishes his stories from the colourless
and staid ones of other hacks by writing a series of entertaining,
sensationalised and, well, predominantly fictional ones (27 out
of 41 if yer counting). A prime example is his titillating depiction
of an after party at a young conservatives' convention, which enlivens
the otherwise insipid editorial meetings. This becomes the norm
as his stories become increasingly eccentric.
Based on Buzz Bissinger's article in Vanity Fair, it is the most
serious tableau of the world of journalism since All The President's
Men - its deadlines, the ambition of young reporters, the competition
with other magazines and journalists within your own.
Christensen plays Glass' role in a fantastically Machiavellian vein,
showing that he has more depth than his arrogant Anakin Skywalker
portrayal of Episode II. His faux self-deprecation and innocence
is teased out well through his "are you made at me?" and
"am I in trouble?" questions, designed to draw sympathy
from his colleagues. This works well with his initial editor, Michael
Kelly (Hank Azaria) - who was killed in the Iraq conflict last year
- and with his loyal girlfriend, Caitlin (Chloe Sevigny).
However, his prevaricator's paraphernalia pack to keep up the lie
is hardly the stuff of a master trickster - he invents a website
for a "major" electronics company which is more akin to
an adolescent's and his fake notes are revealed to be decidedly
slipshod.
Excellent cameo roles are provided especially by Peter Saarsgaard,
whose role as a stiff, unpopular new editor contrasts with the protagonist's
unethical journalistic approach.
So outlandish is Glass' investigative, 'Hack Heaven' piece that
it arouses suspicion at a rival online magazine, Forbes Digital,
and is exposed by the canny Steve Zahn with all the understated
humour of his role in Road Kill.
Kevin Widdop
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R&J
Dir: Joe Calarco
Cast: Tom McKay; David Sturzaker; Daon Broni; Liam Evans-Ford
Yet another portrayal of Shakespeare's tragic love
story, but this time with no women
Shakespeare was very fond of the play-within-a-play
format: In Hamlet, he asks players to perform a play which reveals
Claudius' guilt; in The Taming of the Shrew the local drunkard is
deceived into thinking he is Lord; it also constitutes a very funny
denouèment in A Midsummer Night's Dream in which the tragedy
of Pyramus and Thisbe is performed. The conceit
is used intelligently here by Calarco. Four boys study at a strict,
militaristic boarding school and re-enact the play clandestinely,
immersing themselves in its passion: laughing heartily at the naughty
aspects and bursting into the violent bits with gusto. The context
both engages the young audience with its modern setting and evokes
Peter Weir's film, Dead Poets Society, in which a group of boys
at a not dissimilar prep school are inspired by an eccentric teacher
to read poetry in secret. This rather works to the play's benefit
as it delineates the alchemical aspects fascinatingly: the boys
struggle with their thriving libidos and treat the literature as
something illicit, paralleling Romeo and Juliet's secret love in
a claustrophobic atmosphere.
Lauded in New York and London, the play has been
done to death on stage, but this is a different sort of adaptation.
Calarco has an acute awareness of the nuances of Shakespeare's text:
the boys kiss on several occasions, playing on the confusion in
the lovers' adolescent and vulnerable love. There is a homoeroticism
making the play more sexually-charged and seemed to add to an already
tangibly tense atmosphere: there were restrained gasps from some
sections of the audience.
The dark background works as a presentiment of doom:
Tibalt is killed by Romeo with the imaginative, if somewhat unrealistic,
use of an extraordinarily long red cloth. It also augments the poignancy
of scenes in which Romeo and Juliet are pulled apart. However,
at times, I felt in something of a malaise. The overuse of the cloth
became somewhat tiresome as the only prop. Student 1(Tom McKay)
and Student 4's (Liam Evans-Ford) roles are obfuscated somewhat
as they unfortunately looked very similar from the back row and
the play's short duration meant that some important parts are skirted.
For instance, there is nothing of Juliet's fantasy in the family
vault after taking the potion, making the play's depth ultimately
seem superficial.
Kevin Widdop
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Van Helsing
Dir: Stephen Sommers
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Kate Beckinsale, Richard Roxburgh, Shuler Hensey
A loud, brash and absurd faux-horror best approached
in jest. The film opens in Transylvania, 1887,
in black and white. It moves to Vatican City, then to Paris, then
back to Transylvania where the avatar of courage Van Helsing pursues
Dracula. It is a homage to Universal's classic
horror films of the 1930s and 40s, and, something those works had
in abundance, Van Helsing only ephemerally provides: that scare
factor.
The film includes the usual fare of its hackneyed
genre: dark skies, full moons, alchemical changes from human to
werewolf by midnight together with dramatic, operaesque music from
composer Alan Silvestri, who also worked on The Mummy and its sequel
with director Stephen Sommers.
Heartless and cold, Dracula is intent on world-domination;
Van Helsing, or Gabriel, wants to stop Dracula; and Frankenstein
enjoys a half-man/half-monster hybrid whose objective is rather
less grandiose - existence. That he is betrayed by his cohorts,
however, doesn't help him.
The foolhardy eponymous character doesn't
understand that reifying Dracula is a self-defeating and exhausting
task. He has been buried, stabbed and subjected to various other
styles of corporal punishment before, but to no effect. This did,
though, provide some entertainment of sorts.The
scenes between Beckinsale and Jackman tease out the film's thoroughly
emetic, decidedly aphoristic and unashamedly sentimental qualities
particularly well. A prime example of this is in its laughable pseudo-philosophical
insights, such as "to have memories of those you've loved and
lost is perhaps harder than to have no memories at all." True
and thought-provoking.
So bored does Sommers seem with the trivialities
of cinema - namely interesting dialogue - that he fires another
fusillade of special effects at us as punishment and laces the cinematography
with an unhealthy mosaic of chintz, offering little time for reflection
- what opportunities you do have are ridden with pathetic, glib
dialogue.
Furthermore, the close-ups of Dracula's loyal,
large-breasted brides were deliberately provocative - though the
dialogue they were given was so embarrassing that I think the director
was offering some sort of hope in these otherwise manure-infested
vignettes. These facets were, however, incredibly amusing, as the
camera seemed to move indiscreetly from the brides' faces to their
rain-soaked breasts.
That we're left with a werewolf, a friar and
a woman with a grudge is more like the plotline for a bad joke,
than any serious dénouement. But perhaps that wasn't the
point anyway.
Kevin Widdop
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Torque
Dir: Joseph Kahn
Starring: Martin Henderson, Ice Cube,
Monet Mazur, Jay Hernandez and Matt Schulze.
Tawdry, gaudy, derivative tale about bikers indulging
in superfluous fun in California
The
film’s pace reflects its title, a turning or twisting force, and
the music videos and commercials which have been a staple of director
Joseph Kahn’s career. That producer Neal H. Moritz’s previous credits
have included The Fast and the Furious and its sequel, XXX, and Swat is a precursor
to the nonsense that ensues, which, for the record, includes implausible
chase sequences, gratuitous violence and excruciating dialogue.
It is
a clichéd-packed, bravado-induced bikefest, which revolves around
the return of hero Ford (Martin Henderson, previously of The
Ring), after a hiatus in Thailand, which engenders sundry slurs
from his foes, which in turn inspires an unfortunately brief discussion
about whether Thailand is a country and whether Sushi originates
from China or Japan.
There
is something about Ford being framed for murder which constitutes
the scant interludes between the mayhem, providing the subtext for
a plot, so-called. But it’s not a film to appeal to reason, rather
to our most primitive pleasures. To that extent, it fulfils its
purpose within its short duration, one of the more attractive features,
but is nevertheless quite crude.
It’s
one of those films where people soliloquise, “Ford, what’s he doin’n
here?” or yell such threats as, “You got till sundown to hand over
my bikes”. Ford’s foe as head of another gang is even called Henry
James (Matt Schulze) and one of his cohorts is called Luther, which
I’m sure was hinting at allegory.
Keeping
with the trend of singers-to-screen converts, Ice Cube, most prominently,
Christina Milian and Fredro Starr (the artist formerly known as
rapper Shine) appear. While Cube’s performance as Wallace is hilarious
if only for his myriad grimaces and preposterous anachronisms, such
as “Fuck the pow-leese”, Milian’s is an insignificant cameo role
and is eventually and irreverently disposed of, and Starr plays
the trite, overly-pugnacious black guy within a larger group of
pugnacious black guys.
The film moves discursively
and rapidly from one absurdity to another. There is a pursuit on
top of a moving train and also a violent exchange between two of
the film’s more conspicuous women, the unrecognisable Jamie Pressley
as China and Shane (Monet Mazur), which presumably aims at levelling
up the imbalance between the manifest prevalence of machismo with
the hitherto-used female existent purely for sensual pleasure.
Kevin
Widdop Leeds University 2004
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