Director: Clint Eastwood 

From the director who brought us Changeling and Million Dollar Baby, Invictus hits the notes that you would expect and indeed want a Clint Eastwood blockbuster to reach.

Director: David Bowers

Cineworld

Based on the venerable Osamu 'Manga God' Tezuka anime, Astro Boy has much to live up to. Started in 1963, the iconic manga has delighted audiences around the world for close to fifty years and has only now been given the Hollywood treatment, albeit with disappointingly predictable results.

Director:  Steve Jacobs

Filmhouse: Saturday 6th February - Thursday 11th February

In a time when too many screen adaptations of prize winning novels stray so far from the original text and intention of the novelist that they become unrecognisable from their original source and indeed go so far as to produce a wholly different, more audience friendly ending, Steve Jacobs can at least be applauded for his faithful screen adaptation of JM Coetzee’s 1999 Booker Prize winning examination of post-apartheid South Africa.

Unfortunately it is here that any applause must quickly fade, as Jacobs serves up to us a film with more unsympathetic characters, bizarre personal representations  and clumsy political allusions than any movie should ever have the right to ask an audience to endure.

Malkovich’s poetry lecturer and professor, despite the script trying to tell us on countless occasions otherwise, is a soulless and passionless creature. The ‘immoral’ affair with a young female student, who seems as wet as the rain she is seemingly forever avoiding, that brings about his downfall highlights more than anything the mechanical emotionally detached nature of his character. 

Clumsy attempts by the script to draw comparisons with the ‘beast driven by personal desire’ in the works of Byron that Malkovich is presenting to his class and the character of Professor Lurie himself  are quite honestly laughable as we are presented with a man many leagues removed from a ‘devil may care’ wild and uncontrollable animal. Whether this stunted representation of Professor Lurie is a result of Malkovich’s ever increasing battle with South African verb sounds, or the real intention of the director and actor it’s hard to conclude, but the result leaves us as unemotionally affected by the character as he himself seems to be with the world and those around him.

Things don’t really improve when Lurie, finds himself in self exile on his daughter’s rural smallholding, following his expulsion from his position at the university.  If possible in Lucy, his daughter, we find an even more unsympathetic and infuriating individual than her father. The horror that befalls Lucy seems to leave her so detached from life and her own fate that you quickly lose any deserved sympathy and basically give up caring about what happens to either the pathetically accepting women or her father. Her description in particular of her own rape as a white women being a “collection of something owed” and defending her black rapists as being mere “debt collectors” is tedious and unrealistic.

Even after Lurie has finally shown some much overdue emotion and anger at the rape of his daughter and her choice and determination to pursue a life of reconciliation in the country’s emerging social order, this quickly disappears as he returns to the cold unfeeling and acceptance of all around him. In fact throughout the whole film every character seems to display an attitude to the incidents and changes around them that bypass passive acceptance and head straight into the realms of that of uncaring somnambulant.

Throughout the duration of the isolated farm scenes, the director didn’t miss a single opportunity to deliver many verbal and visual allusions to the political nature of post-apartheid South Africa that they are easily lost in a sea of political allegories, their frequency and clumsiness detracting from any impact the insights were intended to have.

In a final crushing indictment, the film ends with the central characters deciding to go inside to have a cup of tea. This final verbal exchange highlights wonderfully the apparent lack of desire and interest to all around them that will also leave an audience unconcerned about their plight and situation, and ultimately almost completely indifferent to any insight the film hopes to offer on the state of post-apartheid South Africa.  

2/5

Director: Martin Campbell

Clint Eastwood played the tough old timer in Gran Torino, Michael Caine did the same in Harry Brown. Now it’s Gibson’s turn to play the old guy fighting against the horrors of modernity and resume his position in front of the camera, rather than behind.

In Edge of Darkness, we have Mel Gibson, resuming his one destined role of the tough cop fighting against all odds. But this time things are different: this is a grave thriller. There are no witty one-liners, manic car chases or excessive uses of pyrotechnics. Gibson plays Craven, an old policeman who waits nervously at the train station to greet his little girl, now grown up.

The film then moves along at a rather stately pace, where Craven begins to uncover the cause of his daughter’s murder; she was looking to expose the nuclear company she works at.  Cue the other two main characters, Jedburgh (Ray Winstone) and Bennett (Danny Huston). The former is a shady spy paid to clean up the mess, although it’s unclear which side he’s on, while Danny Huston is typecast playing a greasy businessman. They might as well have given him a cat and an eye-patch. It’s clear he is the bad guy from the outset.

And that’s essentially the problem with the film: it’s all a little slow and predictable. The great secret of the nuclear company turns out to be rather tame, you find yourself wondering why a Londoner is lurking in the murky depths of political scandal, and the dialogue struggles to retain the audience’s attention.

 The best parts of the film are genuinely the quick action pieces.  They are brutal and short, more realistic than the 20 minutes it often takes the likes of Jackie Chan to dispose of an enemy. And it’s not always clear that Craven is up to the task, his breath is laboured, and it’s uncertain how much battering his old body can take. After one fight, we see Craven exhausted and clutching his heart. So when he does triumph it is quite satisfying. It’s good that Gibson is not trying to play someone unstoppable and invincible: Craven feels pain, then limps home to recuperate.

As soon as Gibson is off camera, the film wallows in mediocrity.  Huston is a villain that you can't hate, simply because he is so boring. There is no real emotional investment in any of the characters aside from Craven. Winstone’s spy seems out of place and almost an unnecessary part of the plot. We are entitled to a snippet of his life, but it is done so obscurely that the next scene is ruined as you spend it trying to figure out what the last one was trying to tell.

Edge of Darkness is precisely what this film is: tonally grey, and teetering on being a decent movie, if only the script were sharper and the conspiracy more shocking. If the film has one thing going for it, it’s that it can at least show that Gibson can still pull the punches. He is the anchor of the film and without him this would be completely lost at sea.

2/5

Anyone who has been following this year’s Hollywood awards Season will know that this film has been receiving praise and multiple statuettes left, right and centre.  Set in Harlem in the late 80s, the long-titled film follows the story of Clarisse Precious Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), an obese illiterate sixteen-year-old girl who is pregnant with her second child by her father who raped her on a regular basis. She lives with a physically, emotionally, and (it is implied) sexually abusive mother who often force-feeds her and tries to stop her from going to school. Escaping into fantasies of being famous, having a light-skinned boyfriend and a family who loves her, Precious finally finds a glimmer of hope in an alternative education programme where her teacher, Blu Rain (played by Paula Patton and based on the author of the novel), goes above and beyond the call of duty in helping Precious get on her feet.

The film certainly packs the emotional punches between rape and incest and abuse and poverty and AIDS to list but a few. However, Lee Daniels, does an admirable job in keeping the tone light enough so that you don’t leave the cinema feeling suicidal. Heavy moments of tension are tempered with breaks of humour mostly provided by the other girls in the ‘Each One Teach One class’ as well as incisive
observations in Precious’ narrative.

Some viewers may have problems with Daniels’ approach to the difficult moments in the film, as it seems as if he is avoiding them. Rape scenes are interrupted by Precious’ brightly coloured fantasies and loud music. However, this technique is quite effective in reflecting Precious’ own way of dealing with problems and they gradually disappear from the film as she gets stronger and more confident.

What could have been handled better was the use of the father in the film. His face is never seen and he only makes one appearance despite being at the heart of all these problems. It’s fair enough that the story isn’t about him, but his absence seems to excuse him as all the animosity is directed as the mother.

4/5