Reviews

Some films are bad because they are badly acted or badly produced, or the script is weak. Amandla is none of these (much); it is a bad film because it is designed to convince the viewer that life is horrible, most people are horrible, and those who aren't, come to horrible ends. Seriously, there isn't a glimmer of hope throughout this pageant of brutality that makes Game of Thrones look like a Disney production. But at least the brutality of Game of Thrones takes place on an epic scale.

"Amandla" ("power") was a rallying cry of the anti-apartheid movement, so I was expecting something stirring, or at least politically aware, but it's hard to tell what message the film is trying to give. Don't move to Soweto? Don't take up burglary as a way to put your brother through police academy? Politically, it says little other than the New South Africa isn't everything it was cracked up to be. Yes, South Africa has serious problems with violent crime, but we all knew that, and the early '90s, when the film is set, were a peak. More importantly, there is no suggestion of how we should act on this or even interpret it; it's just there as a trigger for our tragic protagonist, a kind of "girlfriend in the fridge" trope with a more than usually nasty tqwist.

Speaking of girlfriends, the female characters only appear as sacrificial or self-sacrificial victims. As for the white characters, they are just the "good Boer/bad Boer" stereotypes. If anything, there's an implication (presumably unintended) that we'd have been better off if only the good Boers were running things.

"Amandla" is a completely misleading title. The overall message of this film seems to be: your dreams will be crushed and everyone you love will die, and it will be your fault as much as anyone's.

If you are a fan of cheesy '80s kung fu films, you will love Lady Bloodfight, as it is basically Bloodsport with a largely female cast - in fact the original title was going to be Lady Bloodsport but was changed presumably for legal reasons. It also references some other martial arts tropes, like the age-old (and largely fictitious) rivalry between Shaolin and Wudang. The only points where I thought the silliness got out of hand were: 1. The wepaons round (halberd vs. Nunchakus??!!) 2. The fact that a secret kung fu society in Hong Kong decides to give their highest tournament a Japanese name (kumite), but of course that's a reference to the original Bloodsport movie. Basically, it's a goofy, feel-good movie about young women discovering the true meaning of friendship, loyalty and forgiveness by kicking the crap out of each other.

I chanced upon The Book of Love while channel-switching, saw Maisie Williams, looked for the repeat and watched it. I very nearly didn't because the synopsis made it look like a Hallmark production (bereaved architect heals himself by helping troubled teenager build a raft to sail round the world) but I thought, "What the hell, it's Arya" and watched it. I'm glad I did, because although it contains a slew of "heartwarming" clichés, it plays around with them in a very quirky way, to the extent that it's almost but not quite a satire on the genre. But there's more than playing around with clichés: the relationship between the two main characters is lovely, and there are some thought-provoking moments, though it's easy to skip over them.

Just like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was Ang Lee's tribute to wuxia films, Man of Tai Chi is Keanu Reeves' tribute to 1980s chop sockey films. It's nowhere in the same league as Crouching Tiger, but it's still fun. It has all the tropes you'd expect: young ambitious student, wise old master, old temple, illegal fight club, different styles lined up against each other, using the Force, going over to the Dark Side ... uh, hang on, I'm getting my genres mixed up here.

My main gripe with the film is that there wasn't enough t'ai chi in it. There's some nice pushing hands in a training scene near the beginning, and Tiger strikes a few t'ai chi poses (though why anyone would adopt Single Whip as an opening stance, I have no idea), but most of his fighting is the usual acrobatic film fu. If the aim of the character, and presumably the director, is to show that t'ai chi is a fighting method and not just a mystical-looking exercise, then it's counter-productive to abandon it as soon as a serious fight starts.

All in all, if you enjoyed classics like Bloodsport, you'll get your money's worth out of Man of Tai Chi. Just don't expect anything deep; this is just Keanu Reeves having fun with a genre he loves.

I can see why some people might not like "The Grandmaster". Martial artists who want an accurate biopic of Ip Man will be as disappointed by this as by the earlier film "Ip Man"; on the other hand, such a film would probably be deadly boring to anyone else. On the other hand, people wanting a straightforward kung fu flick will also be disappointed. This is a kung fu art film, and as such, it excels. Every shot is a picture, and the film should be watched accordingly. If you don't like the kind of film where the camera pans away from a fight to zoom in on some raindrops, don't watch it.

The story is a little confusing, not least because it is as much about Gong Er as Ip Man - in fact it should have been called "The Grandmasters" (a title Wong Kar-Wai briefly considered). The understated flirtation between the two of them is a rather thin device to keep the two story-lines together and the main reason I'm not giving this film a ten. Having a real person fall in love with a fictional character just seems pointless. The other thing I knocked off a point for is that the stories of the other masters - Ma San and The Razor - seem to have been mostly left on the cutting room floor. Ma Sen thus comes across as a cardboard "bad student" and The Razor seems superfluous.

From a martial arts point of view, it's fun watching the different styles and the disputes between them. Again, nothing actually happened like it did in the film, and the fights are stylised representations of what a fight between masters of different styles would look like, but the moves are recognisable as Wing Chun, Hong Gar, Bagua and so forth. Zhang Ziyi studied a lot of Bagua while preparing for the film, and it shows. A martial arts (or even a martial arts film) background is not necessary to enjoy the film, though; the cinematography alone carries it.

As a t'ai chi player, I watched this film hoping to see a lot of t'ai chi (I'd already started running scenarios in my head where the brash young Jet Li learns t'ai chi from Michelle Yeoh). In this respect, and only in this respect, I was disappointed, as this is not a t'ai chi film but a story about how t'ai chi came to be. In every other respect, I was supremely satisfied. This is first class wuxia, alternating crazy fights with goofy humour, with a little tragedy and philosophy thrown in. Of course this mix will probably be insufferable to anyone who isn't into wuxia, but if you like the kind of martial arts films where combatants call out the name of the move they're about to do, you'll love this. Incidentally, you'll notice the inspiration for a fight in Charlie's Angels in one of the early scenes: "And this one's called knocking you on the head."

I very nearly stopped watching The Great Beauty about half way through, as although the film starts and ends beautifully, it sags badly in the middle. I was going to say the plot gets lost, but that would be inaccurate, since the film really has no plot. Generally this is the sign of an over-rated European art-house film, but somehow Paulo Sorrentino manages to pull it off, and I was very glad I kept watching until the end. The Great Beauty is beautiful, touching, sometimes funny and often absurd. The cinematography is delicious, the characters are finely drawn, the music is lovely and the acting is excellent. And it's set in Rome. That, I suspect, is the main appeal of the film; if it had been set in, say, Wolverhampton, I might well have given up on it, which would have been a shame.

If you like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you'll love this film; if not, you won't. It's as simple as that. Apart from sharing Michelle Yeoh, similar tropes appear: older vs. younger woman fighter; desire for love vs. desire for peace; an object of great power that everyone wants to get their hands on; poisons; people running up walls and flying through the air - all the normal wuxia stuff. There are also hints of Kill Bill (not surprising given Tarantino's drawing on Chinese martial arts films). Our heroine, Drizzle, is a member of a group of elite assassins who turns her back on the life of stealth and slaughter and runs off with said object of great power. Her former colleagues don't take too kindly to this, with the usual bloody consequences. In other words, the film is over-the-top acrobatic violence from beginning to end.

Pathfinder ought to be a terrible film. It's about as historically accurate as Braveheart and completely unoriginal, being essentially a remake of the (very good) Norwegian film of the same name, with bits of First Blood, Kato's Land and Fuqua's King Arthur thrown in. But if you can stop yourself going "Dude, Vikings didn't have cavalry!"* and suchlike, you can enjoy it as a straightforward action/fantasy film. It's the usual story of the bad guys who burn the village and the hero who stops them, which means it has funky barbarian costumes, cool weapons** and traps, spectacular landscapes and of course lots of fight scenes, and the fight scenes are done really well. As a bonus, it's beautifully filmed.

* OK, Vikings did sometimes use horses as transport, but they didn't take them on their ships; they stole them when they arrived, and in America there would have been no horses to steal.

** Including one-handed flails, which didn't appear until the late Middle Ages.

One problem with Turkish comedy is that it tends to be very specific to Turkey: if you aren't Turkish (or living in Turkey), you won't understand a sit-com like Türk Malı or Avrupa Yakası, and you'll even miss a lot of the jokes in a SF comedy like G.O.R.A. Organize İşler (confusingly untranslated as "Magic Carpet Ride" after one of the songs in the soundtrack) is unusual in that it manages to be very Turkish in feel, but universal in its humour.

The film shows us the lives of two families: a middle-class intellectual couple and their daughter on the one side, and the "family" of organized crime on the other. In between is a failed stand-up comedian, "Superman" Samet, whose attempt to hang himself (dressed in his Superman costume) at the beginning of the film is interrupted by our criminal anti-hero Asim, who is escaping a jealous husband. The plot continues in a similarly absurd vein, and critics have complained about the story's disregard for logic, but then this is a comedy; nobody complains that Monty Python and the Holy Grail has an absurd plot. The important thing is that the characters are well drawn, from the irritatingly logical physics professor Nuran to the lovable but unprincipled and incompetent Asim, and the dialogue is hilarious, with a lot of the humour surviving translation. The film also gives a great picture of the contrasts of İstanbul (even though the scenes of the "çingene" neighborhood where the gang live seem to be from İzmir).

It is hard to say anything negative about such a well-intentioned and well-produced film, but I found Kandahar an immense disappointment.

The film deals seriously with a serious subject, and one which is still relevant (since life for women since the fall of the Taliban hasn't improved as much as we'd like to think). It is also beautifully shot, and has a captivating soundtrack made up from Afghan music. There are also some interesting characters, such as the American activist who went to Afghanistan to fight the Russians and stayed to use his para-medical skills to help the Afghan people.

The one ingredient missing is a plot. There is a plot-device: the heroine is going to Kandahar to find her sister (who has written to say that she will commit suicide). However, this is merely a vehicle for a travelogue. As a documentary showing life under the Taliban, Kandahar is excellent, but as a film, it is weak.

"Mexican cocaine deal"? The scam takes place on the Chinese-Kazakh border!

This is not one of Segall's better films: the plot is confused, and the special effects are obvious Matrix-copies (bullet-time and all that), and after Indiana Jones, Tomb Raider and Relic Hunter, the role of archaeology professor with a double life is stale, to put it mildly. Nevertheless, it has some atmospheric photography and some great fight scenes. In short, don't buy the DVD, but rent it if you fancy some mindless fun.

The Survivors is not one of Robin Williams' best films, but it is worth watching, and thinking about. The beginning keeps you guessing about what kind of film it is - Robin Williams' character, Donald, is fired from his job, and we have a few comments about the Social Security system. Then suddenly he foils a robbery, together with Walter Matthau (Sonny).

The two characters go in different directions - Sonny tries to make a deal with the robber to leave them alone, while Donald goes to Vermont to join a survivalist community. Each try to deal with the villain in their own way.

The film suffers from sentimentality and moralism, like most of Williams' films, but it has humour and a good insight into the paranoia of American society.

The Lost Empire, or The Monkey King, as it was called when I saw it on the Hallmark Network, is a silly film, but a very enjoyable one. It attempts to put a new spin on the Chinese classic, Journey to the West, which tells the story of how a monk went on an epic journey to recover some sacred scriptures, aided by the mischievous Monkey King, the gluttonous Pigsy and the sombre Sandy.

In this modern version the companions are the same, but the monk is replaced by a modern American sinologist, and the "scripture" is the original manuscript of Journey to the West itself, which is about to be destroyed by the "five traditional masters", who represent the forces of conservatism. Confused? It gets worse; if the book is destroyed, all the human progress that has taken place since the book was written will be reversed and the world will revert to feudalism. To cap it all, the Jade Emperor, Confucius and Kuan Yin, the goddess of compassion, are all weighing in.

With a scenario like this, the film cannot help but being absurd in places, but the absurdity, intentional or otherwise, is part of the fun, as it was in the original Journey to the West, which is a comedy as well as an analogy of the spiritual journey. Viewers who have read Journey to the West will enjoy the references to it; others can sit back and enjoy the visual richness, which as well as some spectacular scenes and SFX, includes Bai Ling as Kuan Yin, looking far more sexy than a goddess of compassion ought to (but then that's one of the twists in this tale as well).

The Swing (Die Schaukel) was advertised as a German Fanny and Alexander, but somehow never achieved the same fame. True, it is not a masterpiece in the same league as Fanny and Alexander, and Percy Adlon isn't Ingmar Bergman, but it is an excellent film nonetheless.

The Swng is the story of three sisters in a middle-class German family fallen on hard times, set just before the First World War. It tells of ordinary things - a love that comes to nothing, a girl who wants to be a writer, darning socks, and so on. There is nothing in the plot that gives a clue to the beauty of the film; you just have to watch it.