DREAM SCENARIO****

Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli's DREAM SCENARIO is a film that feels as though it could have been made by a collective of Spike Jonze, Charlie Kauffman and Michel Gondry. This is a good thing. 

Nic Cage stars as a schlubby university professor who starts showing up in everyone's dreams. At first this leads to a wonderful surge in popularity - students actually turn up to his lectures and he gets a book deal. But when his dream avatar turns into a nightmare, the world turns on the real life professor. He and his family are shunned, and then subject to violence. The book deal morphs into a crass trashy occult-baiting book.  The poor man's entire life is upended.

The film has lots to say about the absurdity of the mob - whether in hyping someone up or tearing them down. The increasingly surreal dreams are beautifully executed. And through it all we have Cage's measured, disbelieving, horrified Professor. People are right when they say it's the most well-modulated performance Cage has given in years - playing against type - or rather the caricature that Cage sometimes puts forth of himself.

The resulting film is an intelligent and darkly absurd satire that entertains and provokes. Superb!

DREAM SCENARIO is rated R and has a running time of 102 minutes.  It played Toronto 2023 and was released in the USA and UK last November.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL****

With SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL, director Yuval Adler (THE SECRETS WE KEEP) teams up with debut feature writer Luke Paradise and cinematographer Steven Holleran to create a stylish, unabashedly nasty, almost Grindhouse thriller. I suspect your tolerance for the film is going to be dependent on how far you enjoy Nic Cage being insane, and whether you enjoy a pastiche of Tarantino pastiching the ultraviolet revenge thriller genre. But for me, this taut 90 minute two-hander is impressive in its commitment to a simple, brutal, story.

The film opens with Joel Kinnaman's uber driver going to see his pregnant wife give birth, driving through the dark neon-lit streets of off-strip Vegas. Barely a beat passes and he is carjacked by Nic Cage with luminous red hair and a large gun.  What then transpires is a talky, occasionally hilarious, sinister, twisty thriller. The title of the film is some kind of hint, but who really is the devil?  We get two superb set-pieces. The first, a fantastic diner scene that can only be described as Peak Cage.  The second, an incredibly stylish shoot out that delivers smoky burnt orange skies and a hellscape that felt supernatural and sinister in a way that deeply impressed me.

This is a small low/no release film that will really repay your efforts in seeking it out.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL has a running time of 90 minutes and is rated R. It opened in the USA in late July and is now available to stream on demand in the UK.

SNOWDEN - BFI LFF 2016 - Day 12

Jyoti Kalyan reviews SNOWDEN:

If you have a basic understanding of Edward Snowden’s story, don’t expect to learn anything new by watching this dramatised version. Director Oliver Stone had everything to make this film thrilling by immersing audiences into the psyche of Edward Snowden (Joseph Gordon Levitt ), a high level intelligence contractor who leaks millions of classified documents on how the NSA illegally spy on individuals without their consent or knowledge. There were opportunities for gripping audiences by exploring the moral battles being fought by US Intelligence workers, shedding light on the secret yet ‘legal’ Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts or even uncovering the power and influence possessed by those within the hierarchy of these organisations. However, what we do get is a film that touches interesting points but provides no depth.

Stone’s ‘dramatisation’ seems to hit its crescendo within the first five minutes, where we see Snowden locking himself in a hotel room with three hand-picked journalists, ready to hand over the secret documents. But, from then on, it is flat and dragged out. The recurring theme that US Intelligence Agencies spy on all of us is portrayed through many long-winded examples that it begins to bore the audience. The inclusion of Snowden’s girlfriend adds no value and is all too predictable, especially when focusing on the impact his job has on their relationship. As far as casting is concerned, for me no one stand out in the slightest, and let’s not even begin to delve into what Nicolas Cage is doing playing a mentor to potential intelligence agents.

The film does however end with an actual clip of Edward Snowden, conducting a public interview to a large audience from his new home in Russia. For me, this was a rare scene where you could actually get to know the character and should have been longer!

One should not forget that an incredible story underpins this movie. It is the ultimate David vs. Goliath battle which could have captivated millions of cinema-goers around the world. It is a shame Oliver Stone’s representation doesn’t do Snowden justice. You might just find Wikipedia’s version a lot more fun !

SNOWDEN has a running time of 134 minutes and is rated R. The movie played Toronto and London 2016.  The movie opened earlier this year in Israel, Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Sweden, Turkey, the USA, Vietnam, Brazil, Germany, Croatia, Portugal, Finland, Lithuania, Denmark and Norway.  It opened earlier in October in Spain. It opens in Spain on October 7th, in France on November 2nd, in Greece on November 3rd, in Belgium on November 9th, in Poland on November 11th and in Italy on December 1st. 

THE CROODS

Dreamworks' latest kids animated feature, THE CROODS, is a major disappointment. It has basically the same story as the wonderful HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA, but without the visual style, the wit, the poignancy and the gentle homage to its cinematic antecedents. 

Emma Stone voices Eep, a teenage Neanderthal rebelling against her father Grug's fear of all things new.  This extends to her new more advanced Homo Sapiens boycrush Guy (Ryan Reynolds) - the kid who knows how to make fire, and shoes and whatnot.  After a nasty attack on the family cave, the Croods head off on a road trip to "tomorrow" (I kid you not) with Grug (Nic Cage) and Guy increasingly at odds until, this being a kids film, it all ends happily.

Director Kirk DeMicco (SPACE CHIMPS) and Chris Sanders (HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON) have fashioned a script so completely ham-fisted and devoid of humour as to give their starry cast little to work with. Stone and Reynolds are utterly wasted. The visuals are polished, but in a manner we have come to take for granted from CGI animation. There's none of the layered comedy that filled TRANSYLVANIA, or even PARANORMAN - and none of the teary-eyed family moments that made those two movies adorable and memorable.  The whole thing was just banal and derivative. 

THE CROODS played Berlin 2013 and is currently on release in the USA, Mexico, Indonesia, Argentina, Bahrain, Bolivia, Chile, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Kuwait, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Macedonia, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estonia, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Ireland, Lithuania, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, the Philippines, Romania, Spain, Sweden,  the UK, Uruguay, Venezuela, Belgium, Iceland, the Netherlands, Australia, Hong Kong,  Slovenia, Bulgaria and Finland, It opens on April 4th in Thailand; April 5th in Poland; April 10th in France; April 11th in New Zealand and April 18th in Greece.

THE CROODS has a running time of 98 minutes and is rated PG in the USA.

iPad Round-Up 4 - SEASON OF THE WITCH

Evidently, the Nic Cage crusader-slash-religious-hysteria flick SEASON OF THE WITCH is a bunch of ridonkulous hokum. The key question is whether, like SOLOMON KANE, it manages to embrace its pulpy traits to become a truly entertaining piece of work. The sad answer is, "a thousand times No". SEASON OF THE WITCH is a confused, sub-par piece of hammy genre entertainment, in which Nic Cage is disappointingly not as crazy as he was in BAD LIEUTENANT. 

The plot is pretty simple.  Nic Cage and Ron Perlman are 14th century Crusader knights who, despite battling for their Christian Kings, end up falsely accused and on trial for their lives. Thus newly sensitised to the cruelty of arbitrary justice, they journey home through a plague-infested land.  A monk charges them to deliver a Witch to an exorcism designed to rid the country of the plague, but of course Nic Cage's Knight wants her to have a fair trial. And, after all, we sort of think that the plague might be caused by a travelling salesman with infected reliquaries rather than an innocent girl attracting unwanted attentions. That said, as Roger Ebert points out in his review, the film's post-modern cultural sensitivity is somewhat undermined by the fact that the poor girl doesn't even get a name!  

The look of the film is sort of lo-rent Conan slash Coppola's highly colour-coded Dracula with battle scenes from the Ridley Scott school of loud noises and incomprehensible editing. Lots of over-wrought CGI backdrops, mud and sweat, but not much actual inspiration or imagination. DP Amir Mokri (TRANSFORMERS 3, FAST & FURIOUS) obviously long since sold his soul to Michael Bay and is probably a better candidate for  salvation-by-exorcism than the poor girl. And as for Director Dominic Sena, where's the visual wit and verbal cheekiness that enlivened SWORDFISH? 

SEASON OF THE WITCH went on global release in January through March. It is currently on release in Italy and opens in Japan on July 30th. It is also available to rent and own.

DRIVE ANGRY 3D

DRIVE ANGRY 3D is a brilliantly crass grind-house movie.  If you want to see a hot chick beat the crap out of a naked chick who's just been caught fucking the first chick's fiancé, then this is the movie for you. Or if you want to see a bad-ass smoking a cigar, fully clothed, fucking a naked woman in a motel room, while simultaneously shooting six assholes dead, then this is your flick!  The plot is ridiculous - obviously. Nic Cage plays a dude called John Milton (Paradise Lost, people!) who escapes Hell to chase down a cult-leader called Jonah (Billy Burke) and save his baby grand-daughter from having her head ripped off. Of course! He is helped by a smokin' hot waitress played by Amber Heard, and is in turn chased down by a mean guy called The Accountant dressed in a Men In Black style suit and played by William Fichtner. 

I'm not sure if it makes any sense to seriously review a movie who's every component justifies an exclamation mark, other than to say that director Patrick Lussier and writer Todd Farmer (MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3D) have succeeded in making a movie as ridonkulous and vulgar as CRANK.  It's great as far as it goes and I really loved it for the first hour, but after that, the relentless car chases wore me down. Still, in this age of post-modern detached cynicism, you've got to love any movie that tries so hard to have a balls-out good time.  And, from a technical stand-point, in an era of retro-fitted piss-poor 3D, you've got to embrace DP Brian Pearson's wallowing in the schlock-entertainment factor of the medium.

MY BLOODY VALENTINE is on release in the UK, US, Bosnia, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Canada, Estonia, Lithuania, Malaysia, the Philippines and Poland. It opens next week in Argentina, Egypt, the Czech Republic, Greece, Kazakhstan, Russia, Bulgaria, India and Armenia. It opens on March 25th in Uruguay, Belgium, France and Turkey. It opens in April in Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Italy, Spain, Panama, Venezuela and Singapore. It opens on May 13th in Iceland, on May 26th in Portugal and on August 6th in Japan.

ASTRO BOY - clever but lacking wit

I can't say I'd ever heard of ASTROBOY before watching this film but apparently he is an insanely famous Manga character created by Tezuka Osamu in the 1950s. Apparently the original stories have already inspired a 1960s TV series. In that series, Astroboy started life as the young son of a famous scientist, Dr Tenma. When young Toby is killed in a car accident, Dr Tenma resurrects his memory in a robot, CAPRICA stylee. But tragically, Tenma is revolted by his creation and sells him to a vicious circus-owner called Hamegg (shades of ELEPHANT MAN) whence he is rescued by Tenma's kind-hearted boss, Ochanomizu. Tenma may occasionally help Astroboy, but he never truly accepts him.

In this new film, ASTROBOY has been yanked into our contemporary political tensions. The whole narrative takes place in a world that has been ruined by litter-bug exploitative humans (shades of WALL-E) and the elite of the world have relocated to a shiny Metro City in the clouds. Metro City is being run by a politician who wants to start a war to win an election. Rather than being killed in a car crash, Astroboy is killed when the evil politician tries to put evil red energy into a military robot. His father still rejects him, but in order to make Tenma more palatable to modern audiences, he doesn't actually sell him to the circus owner. Rather, Toby runs away, and ends up with Hamegg by chance. And Hamegg is a more equivocal character - he truly loves robots, but at the end of the day, doesn't think AI makes you worthy of human rights. (A good debate for BSG fans!)

The resulting film is pretty complex for a kids film, and like Miyazaki films, is concerned with environmental degradation and consumption run amok. It also has shades of the best science fiction, making explicit reference to Asimov. The CGI animation is interesting in its design and the voice work is particularly good. I especially liked Freddie Highmore as Astroboy, Nic Cage as Tenma, and a modulated Bill Nighy as the heart-breakingly kind Elefun. But somehow, the diffuse plotting made for a rather plodding film, especially in the middle portion where Astroboy falls to Earth and side-steps into a film that seems to be half Oliver Twist and half Gladiator. I rather missed the wit, charm and old-fashioned simplicity of David Bowers previous directorial effort, FLUSHED AWAY.

ASTRO BOY played London 2009 was released last year in the US, Canada and Asia, It is now on global release.

Londn Film Fest Day 10 - BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS

Werner Herzog's remake of the 1992 Harvey Keitel flick BAD LIEUTENANT is insane. Herzog is basically inviting us to join with his actors in laughing at the crime thriller genre. To say that the performances are hammy, or that the direction is off-the-wall, doesn't even begin to capture it. Problem is, with everything subordinated to a cheap laugh, there's nothing to hold our attention for the two hour run-time.

The original flick was directed by Abel Ferrara. It was a gritty, sleazy exploitation film about a New York cop strung out on drugs and booze, investigating the rape of a nun, whose forgiveness of her attacker, the cop can't understand. It was down and dirty, sure, but it was serious, after its own fashion. I was expecting a similar tone to this remake. After all, the new flick is written by William Finkelstein, whose credits include NYPD Blue, Law & Order and Murder One. But no.

Nic Cage stars as a corrupt cop, self-medicating for back pain with smack and crack he hustles from people he's taking down. His girlfriend (Eva Mendes) is a hooker, he's running up serious gambling debts, and he's trying to bring down a local drug baron for executing a Senegalese pusher and his family. The cop claims that there's no limit to what you can achieve when you concentrate, which is like a kind of insane joke at the centre of the film. Because just when the cop should be interrogating someone, or investigating a crime scene, Herzog decides to spend a few minutes in extreme close-ups of iguanas set to a hammy version of "Please release me". In one shot, you can actually see Cage in the background cracking up. By the time Cage's character is ruffling the feathers of a "connected" client of his hooker girlfriend in Biloxi, the movie has truly jumped the shark into "just for laughs" territory. I mean, you can admire Herzog's insanity all you like, but what really is the difference between this flick and SNAKES ON A PLANE?

Some reviewers are going to try and sell you the idea that this movie is so ludicrous it's brilliant. Nope. If this were directed by anyone other than Herzog, they'd be calling it an over-long pastiche B-movie and giving it one star. Don't believe the hype.

BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF NEW ORLEANS played Venice, Telluride, Toronto and London 2009. It opened this autumn in Italy, Greece and Israel. It opens on November 6th in Romania, on November 20th in the US, on December 2nd in Belgium, on January 8th in Sweden, on January 15th in Germany, the Netherlands and Austria, and on March 3rd in France.

KNOWING - A compelling mix of sci-fi and horror

Alex Proyas (I, ROBOT, DARK CITY, THE CROW) has created a beautifully crafted, intelligent, provocative movie that uses the tropes of gothic horror as well as conventional set-piece action flicks to create as compelling a sci-fi flick as I've seen in a while. If the denouement annoyed me (in the same way that the series finale of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica annoyed me) that's not to take away from the ambition of the picture.

The movie has been marketed as a conventional sci-fi flick and vehicle for Nic Cage. Cage plays a MIT scientist, atheist and widower called John whose son, Caleb, is given a mysterious sheet of paper covered in numbers when his elementary school digs up a time capsule. Jon believes that the numbers on the paper show the date, co-ordinates and fatalities of every major world disaster and becomes obsessed with the implication that he knows the date and time of the next three disasters. As an atheist, he has to grapple with the fact that he has seemingly been handed a paper full of prophecies - and that "knowing" cannot prevent them from being lived out. Such is the sci-fi back-bone of this film.

On top of that, Alex Proyas gives us a fantastically impressive disaster movie, as John is drawn to the sites where disaster is prophesied. What distinguishes this film from, say, WAR OF THE WORLDS, is that Proyas dares to really take us into the disasters. Rather than seeing an anonymous plane crash and fireball in the distance, he shows us people being consumed by fire and the traumatic impact that that has on John. Proyas also dares to use the iconography of 9-11, including survivors stumbling through wreckage covered in ash. This adds to the emotional weight and portent of the movie, but not in a sensationalist way. Rather it speaks directly to our new post 9-11 understanding of disaster.

The movie also works as a gothic horror. John and Caleb live in a classic rambling, isolated house on a hill. As is typical in horror, Caleb is a prescient, spooky child, who starts hearing the same whispers of prophesy that the little girl heard fifty years before and wrote down on that fateful piece of paper. He has nightmares and visions that come straight out of William Blake, and the denouement is a quite brilliant combination of sci-fi and horror tropes.

KNOWING is the best film Alex Proyas has made since DARK CITY - the cult classic. It didn't carry me right through to the final scene, but I can appreciate the internal logic and bravado of its conception. I also think Nic Cage should get a lot of credit for playing a character that isn't a two-dimensional action hero and showing us what we knew from early films like MOONSTRUCK - that when he chooses to take on more complex material he really can act.

KNOWING is on release in Kazakhstan, Russia, the US, the UK, Australia, Greece, Malaysia and Iceland. It goes on release next week in Belgium, France, Argentina and Estonia. It opens on April 10th in Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore, Brazil and Turkey. It opens on April 16th in Hong Kong, on April 24th in Portugal, Denmark and Norway and on April 30th in South Korea. It opens on May 21st in New Zealand and on July 30th in the Czech Republic.

BANGKOK DANGEROUS - mawkish

The Pang Brothers English-language remake of BANGKOK DANGEROUS has all the faults of the original plus Nic Cage in a fright-wig. It's an action movie about a jaded assassin (Cage) who falls in love with a deaf-mute Thai pharmacist and wimps out of a political assassination because he wants to do the "right thing". As jaded assassin films go, you'd be better off watching THE MATADOR, and if you want guns, motorbikes, and scantily clad chicks, I give you the early works of Arnie. Frankly, this is all way too slow-moving to satisfy on a superficial level, and far too morally hackneyed to satistfy on an emotional level.

One for pizza and DVD night, at best.

BANGKOK DANGEROUS is on release in Spain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Hong Kong, Russia, Thailand, the UK and the US. It opens later in September in Singapore, South Korea, Norway and Sweden. It opens in October in Greece, Brazil and Finland in November in Poland. It opens in Argentina and Venezuela in December.

NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS - damp squib

The first NATIONAL TREASURE movie was a light-hearted unpretentious mix of Indiana Jones and The Da Vinci Code and much of the team behind the original is back for the sequel. Nic Cage reprises his role as the archeologist cum treasure hunter, Ben Gates. He's got an IT whizzkid sidekick (Justin Bartha), a hot chick girlfriend (Diane Kruger) and a pair of light relief bickering parents (Jon Voight and Helen Mirren). Instead of Auto-Bean, the bad guy is played by Ed Harris. And instead of Templar treasure, Ben Gates is searching for an ancient City of Gold hidden under Mount Rushmore. The adventure will take him to Paris, Buckingham Palace, the Oval Office and the Library of Congress too! One wonders just what is left for the heavily hinted at third installment of the franchise. Ben Gates decodes a puzzle on the moon?!

The problem is that somewhere between the insanely impressive sets and the ludicrously high-amp locations, the honest fun of the first film got lost. I didn't mind the cheesiness of the first flick because it kept me entertained. In NATIONAL TREASURE, I eventually got bored, especially during the final water sequences. And when you're bored, you start poking holes in a plot that can't stand up to such scrutiny. The motivation of the baddie, for instance, seems pretty thin. And a scene where Ben Gates is offering to sacrifice himself for his family is curiously lacking in emotional punch.

Overall then, NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS is a pretty damp squib. Still, I like the concept enough that I'll be hoping for a slightly shorter run-time and slightly less absurd locations in the inevitable next installment.

NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS was released in 2007 in the US, Kuwait, Oman, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Lebanon, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Thailand, Bulgaria, Canada, Estonia, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Spain, the USA, Venezuela, Egypt, Russia, Mexico and Panama. It was released earlier in 2008 in Belgium, Greece, Iceland, Poland, Turkey, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Peru, Colombia, India, Norway, Sweden, Argentina, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Germany and Denmark. It is currently playing in Denmark and the UK and opens next week in France and Finland.

NEXT - Deja Vu

Like the film-makers who came up with the super-weak title, let's not waste too much time on this piss-poor sci-fi/action flick. Nic Cage is a bad Vegas lounge-act with a worse hair-piece. He can see two minutes into his future enabling him to snag Jessica Biel as a girlfriend. His ability also attracts the attentions of Julianne Moore's FBI agent. She wants to use him to track down nasty but ethnically diverse terrorists who've got a nuke in LA. She has the audacity to do this by forcing open his eyelids CLOCKWORK-ORANGE stylee and making him watch CNN. He just wants to rescue his chick.

It's all very predictable, poorly acted and replete with cheap-looking action sequences. It's also very derivative, although curiously nothing like the Philip K Dick novel on which it's apparently based. Presumably Dick's name was used, much like the Peter Falk cameo, as a shameless hook to draw in the crowds.

Grim.

NEXT is on release in Belgium, France, Netherlands, Slovenia, Denmark, Finland, Israel, Norway, Turkey, the UK and the US. It opens in Sweden, Singapore and Estonia in May; in Egypt and Mexico in August; and in Australia and Iceland in September 2007.

GHOST RIDER - Forecast is for "bad craziness"

When is "bad craziness" not a good thing? When it's so bad, it goes past being crazy and back to bad again. Before we get to the review I should probably explain how psyched I was about seeing GHOST RIDER. What wasn't to like?! I was all set for a popcorn-tastic, camp classic roller-coaster-ride of motorcycle stunts, supernatural bad-asses and cheesy gags. After all, there's no way you can play the following plot without your tongue in your cheek: a kid called Johnny Blaze (!) makes a deal with the devil to save his father from death by cancer only to see the father die in a motorcycle stunt anyways. Years later, Mephistopheles (Peter Fonda with an insanely bouffant blow-dry-job) forces JB (Nic Cage to honour his contract and harvest souls. Oh yeah, and JB has a childhood sweetheart called Roxy (Eva Mendes) reappear on cue as a TV reporter, and Mephistopheles has a son called Blackheart eager to push daddy into early retirement.

If anyone was willing to accept this movie as a light-hearted romp, it was me, but I was sorely disappointed. It's so flat and long-winded and plain dull that you just can't overlook the absurdity of the thing. In the prologue, the kid who plays Cage Jr is wooden. In the main body of the film, Cage and Mendes have no chemistry. Frankly, I was bored.

GHOST RIDER is on release in Egypt, Indonesia, Kuwait, the Philippines, Taiwan, Australia, Malaysia, Qatar, Russia, Singapore, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, Mexico, Spain, Turkey, the US, Finland, Belgium, France, Germany, New Zealand, Austria, Bulgaria, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Croatia, Hungary, Brazil, Denmark, the UK and Japan. It opens in Hong Kong next Friday and in Argentina, Portugal and Italy the following week. It opens in the Czech Republic on March 22nd and Israel, the Netherlands and Venezuela the following weekend.

Overlooked DVD of the month - THE WEATHER MAN

This month's overlooked DVD is a small-budget indie-type pic written by the guy who wrote the Will Smith schmaltz-fest THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS and directed by the man responsible for PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN. Despite this, it's a rather wonderful, mournful, seditious film featuring a pitifully brilliant performance by Nic Cage.

Cage plays a financially successful Chicago weatherman who hates his life. He's not a qualified meteorologist; he resents the public's identification of him with the weather (not least because they keep throwing fast food at him); his ex-wife is seeing another man; his daughter is obese and self-hating; his junkie son is being sleazed on by a pederast therapist; and to cap it all off, he feels he does not have the respect of his fatally ill father. Unsurprisingly, then, this movie is downbeat. It's like a blue-grey tone poem of middle-aged angst; brilliantly and brutally well-observed.

The movie is so relentlessly down-beat that some have complained that it's dull to the point of frustration. But that, I think, overlooks the thin but rich stream of black humour contained within the script. There's an interior monologue as Cage's weather man has to go to the grocery store and pick up some tartar sauce for his wife that's absolutely hysterical, for example. A more valid criticism is that Michael Caine once again fails to pin down the American accent, but frankly his performance is otherwise so good I can overlook this. Hope Davis is similarly good as Cage's wife, as is Nicholas Hoult as the son.

But the real reason I think this movie deserves a look is that the ending is about as seditious as I can imagine. The fact that some critics have accused it of being schmaltzy staggers me. Because what the movie tells us is that all this stuff is blowing in the Weather Man's face, but he will be okay and his life be judged a success. Why? Because he takes a job as Weather Man on a nationwide breakfast show, pulling in a million two a year. The final scene has Cage standing on a parade float waving and smiling blandly at the crowds lining the streets - behind the fire brigade but ahead of Sponge-Bob. He is rich. "The ultimate American accomplishment" and a damning indictment of American society from the screen-writer and film-maker. I can't remember the last time I saw such a daring, materialistic, seditious ending. And watching this film close on the heels of THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS, I keep wondering if critics missed a trick with just how materialistic and seditious that movie also is.

THE WEATHER MAN was originally released in the US in October 2005 and in the UK in March 2006. It is now out on DVD.

Disconnected thoughts on WORLD TRADE CENTER

WORLD TRADE CENTER is an earnest film. It handles a shocking event in US history with sensitivity. It features a script by newbie Andrea Berloff that carefully uses testimony from survivors no matter how hackneyed or unintentionally political the results may be. It features the sort of glossy, big-budget, impressive, weighty production design and cinematography that one would expect from a grave Hollywood treatment of this subject. And most of all, it features a career-redefining performance from Nic Cage as one of the fireman rescued from the wreckage of the Twin Towers, as well as strong supporting performances from Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

WORLD TRADE CENTER is NOT an Oliver Stone movie. It does not have a grand visual style - it does not engage in taboo subjects with excoriating insight - it does not challenge us to re-evaluate our relationship with events that have become, for better of worse, part of our pop-culture. And while the use of the true story of the heroic religious marine sticks to the facts, it undoubtedly creates a political spin to the movie that seems rather crass and, bizarrely, at odds with Oliver Stone's previous work. Indeed, in this movie I fear that Stone has finally been what his critics have always accused him of being - irresponsible with history - in focusing on the story of the gung-ho US marine.

WORLD TRADE CENTER is not a movie that I think belongs on the big screen, despite its good intentions and largely good performances. I think it belongs on The Hallmark Channel. It may be all 100% true and earnestly transmitted to the audience, but the conversations between the two firefighters and the visions they experience seem to me - when projected onto a movie screen - incredible and manipulative.

It is, to me, incomprehensible that a film-maker should come at 9/11 from this angle. For me, it is up there with SCHINDLER'S LIST as a truly bizarre film. I find there to be something sociologically interesting but nonetheless depressing about the choices that Stone and Spielberg have chosen to make. To me, 9/11 is about an act of brutal violence and innocent civilians being murdered. It's about bad things happening. To focus on the handful of people who were rescued - on the small glimmer of light - just seems dishonest. And I know my reaction is perverse, because after all these are true stories and deserve to be heard too. But I can't get rid of the sneaking suspicion that Oliver Stone has handed us a security blanket when what I, for one, really want is for someone to shake me up and help me make sense of what happened.

WORLD TRADE CENTER is on release in Canada, the US, Italy, France, Mexico, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Israel, Portugal, Thailand, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Austria, Brazil, Spain, Turkey and the UK. It opens in Australia, Slovenia, the Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Singapore, Sweden, Japan, Greece, Italy, Argentina and Hong Kong in October. It opens in Egypt, Chile and Vietnam in November 2006.

THE WICKER MAN (2006) - like sending a three-toed sloth out to sieze turf from a wolverine

Significant plot spoilers follow......

At times of trouble I turn to the good Doctor. Hunter S. Thompson, that is. I quote from FEAR & LOATHING ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL - his record of the 1972 Presidential election: "The mood of the nation in 1972 was so overwhelmingly vengeful, greedy, bigoted and blindly reactionary that no presidential candidate who even faintly reminded Typical Voters of the fear and anxiety they'd felt during the constant sexual upheavals of the 1960s had any chance at all of beating Nixon." In that weird time - when the giant post-hallucinatory downer hit the free love generation - we got a movie for the times: THE WICKER MAN. Now, thirty-three years later, when one half of America thinks abortion should be outlawed and the other half is cheerfully celebrating gay marriages, THE WICKER MAN once more appears on our screens. But how the mighty are fallen.

The 1973 version of THE WICKER MAN is a bizarre British (oc)cult thriller, directed by Robin Hardy using a quality screenplay by Anthony Shaffer. Shaffer wanted to write a horror story without blood and he did that by messing with our heads rather than our spleens and by using the structure of a whodunnit. In the Hardy/Shaffer film, a virginal, fervently Christian copper called Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) is mysteriously summoned to an island off the Scottish coast. He is appalled by the licentious locals. At first, we like the locals more than Howie. After all, they're just having a good time, right? But soon the atmosphere turns nasty. The cute "rosemary and thyme" folksy songs cover up a more profound and sinister pagan cult, involving child abuse and human sacrifice. It's all presided over by Christopher Lee, who plays Lord Summerisle. The mood is sombre, sinister and slow-burning, and by the end we are presented with a provocative confrontation between dogmatic Christianty and pagan zealoutry. I have always read the ending as the cinematic equivalent of T.S.Eliot's THE HOLLOW MAN, but its greatness lies in its ambiguity. It could also be seen as powerful warning against moral extremism in all its forms.

THE WICKER MAN (1973) is truly a fascinating film, which is not to say that it's flawless. The folksy dancing and singing can be camp, and the sequence where the beautiful inn-keeper's daughter, Willow (Britt Ekland with an appalling dubbed Scottish accent and a body double) dances and rubs up against a bedroom wall, trying to seduce Howie is irredeemably kitsch. Still, the original movie is a really great film.

I had pretty high hopes for THE WICKER MAN (2006) too. It is written and adapted by Neil LaBute, who famously brought us IN THE COMPANY OF MEN - a movie so brutal it is rarely available on DVD. If anyone would be able to bring us a WICKER MAN for our times, surely it was LaBute? The thing is, this new movie is a 100% studio production. Think of it as a Nic Cage vehicle and nothing more.

To be sure, LaBute has kept the mechanical workings of the original plot. There is still a copper, played by Nic Cage, who is called to a mysterious island to find a little lost girl. But he is no religious virgin - rather a nice, if introverted, guy. Indeed, the 2006 copper, rather than being aggressively seduced by Willow, was actually engaged to her, and comes at her request. And what a sappy, pathetic Willow Woodward (geddit?!) we are given - all hippy hair and pouty lips and about as sexless as a crash test dummy. Nic Cage's character doesn't seem morally outraged by the goings-on the island. He is not asked to question his beliefs or hold onto them against all odds. He ends the movie the same man as when he started - a decent, if introverted guy, who gets straightforwardly freaked out that some nutters might be about to torch a little girl just to ensure their organic honey harvest works out. The other bit of studio cyncism involves supplanting the Christopher Lee/Lord Summerisle character with a woman: horror icon Ellen Burstyn playing Sister Summerisle. I suppose that in a post-DA VINCI CODE world, everything has to be about the repression of the feminine.

Without the philosophical provocation and the slighly mad kistch element, THE WICKER MAN remake becomes a rather dull whodunnit. Except we know the ending. Which makes this movie nothing more than an embarrasing coda in the mythic history of the original movie.

THE WICKER MAN (2006) was released today in the Netherlands and in the UK. It opens in the US tomorrow and plays Venice on the 4th September 2006. It opens in the Philippines, Israel, Italy and the Ivory Coast on the 9th, and in Greece and Iceland on the 22nd. THE WICKER MAN opens in Belgium, Brazil and Spain in October and in Germany and Denmark in November.

THE ANT BULLY - inferior kids flick

THE ANT BULLY is an inferior animated kids movie that comes neither from Pixar nor Dreamworks. It features worse digital animation and scripting than we have come to expect, although still filling the celebrity voice-over quota - this time with Nic Cage, Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep and Paul Giamatti. The movie is written and directed by John A. Davies, the cinematic powerhouse (!) that gave us JIMMY NEUTRON: BOY GENIUS. The idea is that a little kid is being bullied at school and he in turn vents his frustration by bullying ants in his garden. By a strange turn of fate, he himself becomes ant-size and learns all those valuable life lessons that we expect from a kids flick, like Communism is Good! Wait a minute....

If you're a desperate parent THE ANT BULLY might suffice, but if you can you should take your kids Iunless they're really small) to see MONSTER HOUSE instead.

THE ANT BULLY is on release in the US, Israel and the UK. It opens in France, Singapore, Argentina and Taiwan on August 10th; Portugal and Venezuala on August 17th; Greece and Iceland on the 31st; Egypt, Brazil, Spain, Hungary and Italy in September; Finland, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Belgium and Japan in October.

LORD OF WAR – “Evil prevails" but enough about ELIZABETHTOWN….

LORD OF WAR is a decent black comedy about a second-generation Ukrainian immigrant called Yuri Orlov who escapes his low-life existence in New York by becoming a gun runner. There are plenty of cracking one-liners delivered in flawless dead-pan by Nicholas Cage and just enough exposure to the surrealities of African civil wars to leave you with a bad taste in your mouth.

The movie was written and directed by Andrew Niccol, who previously brought us the outstanding sci-fi movie, “Gattica” and the haunting script of the “Truman Show”. In Gattica he coaxed Jude Law into giving his only decent acting performance to date, and he does it again with LORD OF WAR. Nicholas Cage is terrifyingly convincing as a nice guy who just wants to make a buck off the free market. I reckon this is his best performance since he won an Oscar for "Leaving Las Vegas". Niccol also has a great visual eye. The opening scene where we see the life of a bullet from manufacture to detonation, all from the bullet’s point of view, is astounding. It’s probably one of the most impressive credit sequences since “Swordfish”. Niccol also shoots a fantastic scene using time-lapse photography, where we see poor Africans asset—strip a 747.

But LORD OF WAR stops a little short of being great for the reason that this really is a script that revolves around one man, and only devotes time to his relationship with his friends and family in a cursory way. This holds back the film in a number of ways. First, the supporting roles are all under-written and waste the acting talents of Ian Holm (the Hobbit), Jared Leto (“Alexander the Great”’s boyfriend) and Ethan Hawke (the “Cop with a conscience” from “Training Day”). Second, for the film to work we have to be interested in what Yuri is up to. But this is a guy who succeeds in his occupation because he manages to shut out all the nasty aspects of his work. This sort of alienation is fascinating to watch for a while but not for 122 minutes.

So while there is a lot to recommend LORD OF WAR, and it is worth checking out, it is far from a perfect movie. If you really want to see what it is like to trade illegal goods, check out the biopic of a drug dealer named George Jung, played by Johnny Depp, in the fantastic movie “Blow”.

LORD OF WAR opened in the US in September and in the UK in October. It opens in France on the 21st December.

NATIONAL TREASURE - superior popcorn adventure movie

NATIONAL TREASURE is a whole bunch of harmless fun. Equal parts Indiana Jones movie and Da Vinci Code. The film rollocks along at a lively pace, delivering code-cracking, chase sequences, bad guys (Sean Bean), good guys (Nic Cage), and at a neat-O ending. Sure, it's not a work of art, but it handles itself with charm and aplomb - perfect for your Saturday night disposable date movie.

NATIONAL TREASURE went on global cinematic release in winter 2004 and goes on DVD release today.