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Reviews
Love Actually (2003)
Repugnant Manipulative Saccharine Rubbish!
It's films like this that makes you despise what cinema has become - a manipulative medium that contrives a formula to tap into your base emotions with a painting-by-numbers banality. Richard Curtis uses every clichéd, over-used, underdefined character from his big book of cardboard caricatures, then gets all his tired old thesp-chums to appear in it and churn out this sugar-sweet isn't-the-world-wonderful-even-when-you-think-it-isn't rubbish - and then has the audacity to stick it in the cinemas of the world and charge an entrance fee. How long must we tolerate this self-indulgent travesty from a man who is the king of the dumbing-down rom-com.
Notting Hill and Love Actually should forever be consigned to video bargain bucket hell.
Zatôichi (2003)
are you watching Quentin???
If like me you found KillBill the biggest anti-climax of 2003, then a remedy awaits your blues in the form of Takeshi Kitano's blind Samurai Zatoichi. The story echoes Eastwood as The Man With No Name - the lone warrior righting the wrongs - and certainly has the flavour of a Leone tale with beautifully structured flashbacks that enhance rather than negate the story. It is also gloriously amusing with a slapstick slant that entertains amongst the carnage. Blood spews like fountains of red wine and Tarrantino can only watch in awe to the choreography that makes you accept as opposed to watching Uma Thurman and saying 'As If!'
The Brown Bunny (2003)
not so bad but not so good
Yeah... I was there... Cannes 2003. Gallo and Sevigny showing up in a flood of popping flashbulbs. And yeah, this film is one slow ride. But the vitriol that flowed after was unjust and I couldn't help feeling that if some great European master had made exactly the same movie we'd all be finding elegiac metaphors and existential analogies hidden within the subtext (if there was any text that is!) THAT scene with Sevigny is not exactly worth waiting for and you do leave the theatre with the empty feeling of having just watched a two hour documentary of the wheel revolutions on a racing bike. But there is something that stays with you (not boredom), something contemplative and dare I say, profound. If only it was made by Tarkovsky we'd know what that was.
The Mother (2003)
the mother of all age-gap relationships
Kureishi hasn't exactly been blessed with movies that justify the quality of his writing. Recent adapted travesty's like 'Intimacy' have ruined great writing. But The Mother surpasses all his previous incarnations, eclipsing even My Beautiful Laundrette. A middle-aged woman overcomes widow-hood by having a very carnal relationship with the boyfriend of her emotionally-weak daughter. The fact that you believe all this is credit to the quality of the acting as it is to the finite gift of the writing. And in Daniel Craig we have a strutting, brash, gruff anti-hero who denies the audience to ever question why a young stud would contemplate bedding a sagging grandmother. Beautifully shot, the film fails only in the weak depiction of the peripheral characters, but as a study of inconceivable lust, it's a winner.
The Dreamers (2003)
those were the days
Deeply disappointing 'comeback' movie for Bertolucci as we were all led to believe that The Dreamers was his masterful return back into 'Last Tango' territory and abandoning his US-friendly big budget mainstreams. But we were wrong. The king is dead. This limp, uninspiring tale of cinema-loving siblings that befriend an American writer, is bland to the extreme. Eva Green has a face that belongs on a cinema screen, and a body to match, but she just can't act. Michael Pitt is marginally better, but he gets very little in return from his female counterpart to act otherwise.
But it's Bertolucci who depresses the most. Where is the flair, the bravura, and the style of his masterpieces 1900 and Il Conformista. And where is the eroticism needed to ignite this film. Still nestled within Brando's camel overcoat it seems.