Something 4 The Weekend by
"I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one."
Welcome ladies, gentlemen and film
fans everywhere to entertainment manchester's weekly
feature 'Something for the Weekend'. Every Friday, we
deliver to you the best (and, in the interest of balance,
worst) of this week's new cinematic releases. If, as
Forrest Gump once might have said were he a film fan,
cinema really is like a box of chocolates, then think
of us as your mini-menu, steering you away from the
coffee creams and towards the Turkish delights of the
movie world.
The Big Picture
What does a good war movie need? Well, first of all, it obviously needs a war. Apocalypse Now (as quoted above) had Vietnam, MASH Korea, Saving Private Ryan World War Two and Jarhead (released this weekend) the First Gulf War. But, of course, a classic war movie needs much, much more than that.
Personally speaking, Saving Private Ryan ranks high on my own list. The likes of Dirty Dozen and Kelly's Heroes nail the brotherhood and heart crucial to every war flick. MASH supplies the laughs. Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July and Platoon offer the tub-thumping social commentary. And Apocalypse Now produces one of the most palpable accounts
in the absurdity of war. But to my mind, Spielberg's magnum opus is the only one to supply all of these elements.
With Tom Hanks in the lead role and Spielberg producing his usual father-son subtext, how could it not succeed in the brotherhood stakes? With a deftly written script, it supplies just enough humour to increase the heart and, eventually, tragedy. With Jeremy Davies superbly playing the kid of the battalion with a mixture of awe and fear, it produces more scathing social commentary then Stone does just a hell of a lot more subtly. "What is happening," he mutters plaintively to himself as all around him lose their heads. Not even Willem Defoe's death to the strains of Barber's Adagio for Strings comes close to the eloquence of that line. And as for visceral horror, no film in any genre has come as close to capturing the reality of its chosen subject as Spielberg does to capturing war in Ryan. It's tempting to turn the film off after that opening half hour. But to do so would be to miss all the stunning moments I mentioned above.
Late last year, Sam Mendes' Jarhead was being touted as the latest great war film, as well as a potential Oscar front runner. Starring the currently white-hot Jake Gyllenhaal, along with fellow bright young things Jamie Foxx and Peter Sarsgaard, it follows a group if young Marines during their time in the Gulf, during which they do very little in the way of fighting. Instead they party, play ball and basically mess around until it's time to pack up and head home.
Everything looked set for Mendes to follow up American Beauty and Road to Perdition with another modern classic. But lukewarm reviews on both sides of the Atlantic seem to have killed the early buzz dead. The problem seems to be that while Mendes' visual sense is as well honed as it was in Road to Perdition, the biting intelligence which proved so decisive in the success of American Beauty has gone AWOL.
"Like it's hero," writes Empire, "Mendes' film remains frustratingly distant, its characters unfocused, its purpose unclear, so that even as the indelible images sear onto your eyeballs and the emotional jabs knock you sideways, the mind is rarely completely engaged." Meanwhile, Hotdog agrees, writing: "Jarhead has all the right moves, but there's not too much going on between the ears." Judge for yourself from today.
Also Playing...
Another previously hotly tipped Oscar contender is also released today. Memoirs of a Geisha is the long awaited adaptation of Arthur Golden's bestselling novel. Well, when I say long-awaited, I mean by everyone but me. I couldn't care less to be honest. After being shifted around every major Hollywood director's desk for the last few years, Geisha has finally found its home with Rob Marshall.
Set in Japan in 1929, it follows a young woman (Ziyi
Zhang) who is sold to a geisha house before undergoing
rigorous tests eventually going on to become one of
the most celebrated geishas in the country. But her
love for The Chairman (Ken Watanabe) and the emergence
of World War Two threatens to undo all her hard work.
So it sounds EPIC and TRAGIC and also, oooh, FOREIGN,
in that terrible way the Americans like to do - like
The Last Samurai, though perhaps not quite as patronising.
But hey, maybe I'm being too harsh. Maybe it'll be good.
But then again, it is directed by the guy who made Chicago.
A far more interesting prospect is Breakfast on Pluto. It follows 'Kitten' Braden, a young transvestite who leaves her troubled Irish homeland to track her mother across 70s London. Directed by Neil Jordan, it's sure to ooze class. But it's star Cillian Murphy who seems the one to watch here. Having now got the scarily silent type down pat after Batman Begins and Red Eye, it'll be interesting to see how he adapts to this more feminine role in what Hotdog have already called "one of the year's first great films".
And finally, if neither of those take your fancy, how about a pair of horror films. The first, Feed, focuses on an innovative way of killing people: force-feeding them while taking bets on how long they’ll live on the internet. Sounds lovely. Meanwhile, another web themed horror, Cry Wolf, is also released adding a whole new terrifying aspect to AIM - and we thought it was just that weird emoticon that looks like a cross between a man screaming and a man burping.
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