Out Of The Blue - By Paul Bullock

The argument will forever rage about big screen adaptations of real-life tragedies. Certainly there is no easy answer. No matter how sensitive or realistic the portrayal is, all too often the film can feel pointless or trivial in comparison with the event, offering the audience little insight and the families of those involved another painful reminder of unwelcome memories. Directed by New Zealand helmer Robert Sarkies, Out of the Blue is the latest to tread this tightrope, but it does so skilfully and tenderly to produce a shocking but far from sensationalist portrait of a small town ripped apart by murder. Sarkies wrote the screenplay himself (along with Graeme Tetley), adapting it from a Bill O'Brien book about the infamous 1990 Aramoana massacre, in which schizophrenic gun-nut David Gray killed thirteen people. For a film dealing with such a horrifying story, Out of the Blue is filmed surprisingly beautifully. Utilising the stunning New Zealand landscape, Sarkies and cinematographer Greig Fraser create in the opening twenty minute a gorgeously tranquil portrait of a normal coastal town on a regular day. The sun casts a glorious amber hue across the skyline, the sea laps peacefully upon the shore and the people go about their ordinary business. Because of this, the first killing is truly shocking and Sarkies sensibly maintains this realistic but still peaceful mood throughout the massacre. Camera angles are intimately close making the audience feel like they are there, the score is calm and stripped back to basics, again heightening the realism, and the script conjures some touching character moments which make the people involved more than just one-dimensional ciphers. Helping portray those characters is a native cast of established stars and unknown talents. Lord of the Rings actor Karl Urban takes the lead as policeman Nick Harvey, his deep eyes soulfully conveying the fear and bravery of a man who was one of the first on the scene, but he is outshone by Matthew Sunderland, whose loathsome yet sympathetic portrayal of Gray serves to epitomise the film’s themes of the banality of evil and unpredictability of violence. DVD Extras include an informative commentary from Sarkies and O’Brien and a sensitively-handled brace of featurettes about the real-life tragedy. They complete an impressive package to a brilliant piece of filmmaking.

Streamers - By Paul Bullock

Every filmmaker has a distinctive style he or she is well-known for and, thanks to the likes of Short Cuts, The Player and Nashville, Robert Altman became associated with epic, ensemble dramas. However, the late, great direcor also tried his hand at stripped-back, low-key filmmaking, and Streamers is one of the more famous examples of this. An adaptation of David Rabe's same-titled play, the film finds a group of four young army recruits (Matthew Modine and David Alan Grier among them) waiting in their barracks to be sent to Vietnam for service. One is a homosexual (Mitchell Lichetenstein) and two are black, and as the group's anxiety over the war grows so too does their prejudice and aggression towards one another. Adapting his own work, Rabe confidently addresses the film's big issues without seeming trite or condescending, while Altman's decision to hold back on the style, keep his camerawork chillingly calm and not move outside the constraints of the barracks creates an oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere. However, it also means the film lacks life and realism, the stagey shooting imposing a sense of falseness onto the picture and therefore making the characters and their plights rather difficult to relate to. This is not helped by some one-note, over-the-top performances from the cast, particularly Guy Boyd as drunken sergeant Rooney and Lichtenstein, whose portrayal of closeted Ritchie has aged badly and seems a crude stereotype of homosexuality by today's standards. When it was released, the film was sandwiched between another Altman stage show adaptation (Ed Graczyk’s all-female Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean) and innovative fictionalised Richard Nixon biopic Secret Honour. Streamers fits nicely into that experimental era of Altman‘s career, but it really is for completists only.

Stephen King's Needful Things - By James Ellaby

The ratio of 'good Stephen King adaptations' to 'bad Stepheng King adaptations' is fairly heavily skewed in favour of the latter kind, with the likes of Carrie, The Shining, Stand By Me, Misery, Dolores Claibourne, The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and 1408 mostly outweighed by the mediocre likes of The Dead Zone, Firestarter, The Lawnmower Man (though that film doesn't really count as it had little to do with the King story that supposedly inspired it) and Dreamcatcher. The way to tell what is going to be good and what isn't is largely (judging by the lists above) based on who appears in them and who they are made by. While Needful Things has a decent cast, including the likes of Ed Harris, Max von Sydow, Amanda Plummer and J.T. Walsh, it was directed by Fraser Clarke Heston, son of the recently-decesed Charlton Heston. Fraser may be the progeny of Hollywood royalty and may have played baby Moses in The Ten Commandments, but his career since then is not one of note, having been second unit director on City Slickers before getting this 1993 film. The only thing he has directed since is 1996's Alaska, starring his dad as a toilet-paper delivery man who gets stuck in the Alaskan wildnerness with daughter Thora Birch. Awesome as that sounds, the pig's ear he made of Needful Things is evidence enough that Heston jnr was never destined to live up to his dad's name in Hollywood. The original novel is one of King's Castle Rock stories, set in a fictional Maine town that got more than its fair share of trouble in the 80s and early 90s, and the story centers around the arrival of shopkeeper Leland Gaunt, who runs Needful Things, where the town's occupants get things that they have always wanted but could never buy. The items are always more expensive than they can afford, so Gaunt gets them to perform a 'trick' for him, usually a cruel prank on a fellow resident of Castle Rock. This soon spirals out of control and leads to chaos as relations become strained amongst almost everyone, while Gaunt weaves his web of deception. This works fine in the book, mostly because it has time to gradually progress, but in the film, none of it really convinces and none of the characters are strong enough to make you care what happens to them. Harris, Walsh and Gaunt all do the best that they can with a laboured script, but even die-hard King fans will find little to enjoy here.

Paranoia Agent Box-Set - By James Ellaby

Often the most entertaining part of an anime series is the opening credits, mainly because the theme tunes are so bizarre and out of place with the context of the series, and that's the case with Paranoia Agent, make all the more spectacular by the decision to show subtitles for the lyrics. And, wow, are they weird. But then again, so is Paranoia Agent, which tells the story of an enigmatic figure called Lil' Slugger, a teenager on skates who attacks people with a bent baseball bat, and Tsukiko Sagi, a timid young woman who created a famous cartoon dog called Maromi. She is the first victim of his attacks, leading to two detectives trying to unravel just what the heck is going on, and needless to say, it ain't simple. This series is the work of anime legend Satoshi Kon, the director of classic films Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress and Tokyo Godfathers, and in 2004 he decided to make a TV series, saying: "In the case of a film to be shown at theatres, I'm working for two years and a half, always in the same mood and with the same method. I wanted to do something that allows me to be more flexible, to realize instantly what flashes across my mind. I was also aiming at a sort of entertaining variation, so I decided to go for a TV series." It's a dark and occasionally disturbing anime series that he has come up with, and certainly not one for kids, though it's also nowhere near as extreme as some other 'grown-up' animes either, and while it has all the usual quirks of this kind of thing, there are also nods to the likes of David Lynch and Robert Altman in the strange and twisted plot-lines. It's unusual anime fare in some ways, which might put off some die-hard fans, but it's worth sticking with until the end, if only to get some idea of what the heck is happening. It's stylish enough to make it worthwhile and even if you're not enjoying it that much, there's always the theme tune to keep you going back for more...

Jane Doe - By James Ellaby

Teri Hatcher's career has had four distinct phases. Before Lois & Clark, there was a load of guest appearances on TV shows and TV movies. Lois & Clark made her a superstar. between 1993 and 1997, but after it finished and after she appeared in Tomorrow Never Dies, she went back into a career slump until 2004 when Desperate Housewives came along and made her a star again. Jane Doe, from 2001, falls right in the middle of her fallow years and you can probably guess that from the fact that it's a fairly cheesy TV movie, the kind that she would never make nowadays, even though she's hardly made any films at all since the start of Desperate Housewives. More surprising is that Rob Lowe also stars in it at a time when his career was on an upward spiral two years after the start of The West Wing, but then again his career has been littered with bad choices, so perhaps it isn't that much of a shock that he decided to make this. So what is it? Well, it's a film about Jane Doe (her real name, though quite why or how is never explained), a network security employee of arms manufacturer Cy-Kor who ends up being caught up in some kind of murderous plot, and it gets off to a frenetic start with Jane racing around like a rubbish Jack Bauer, trying to rescue her kidnapped son. She's getting instructions from a godawful cockney stereotype English baddie and it is all very 24, but in a low-rent kind of way, and one thing you can say for Jane Doe is that it never really lets up. Unfortunately, the plot is so convoluted that it could probably do with someone taking a few moments to explain what is actually happening, but then again it's unlikely that anyone watching would care. It's equally unlikely that anyone involved in this would look back on it particularly fondly, as the acting is largely poor and the script is unremarkable at best, but Hatcher does fine and Jane Doe is enjoyable enough as a dumb thriller.