It may have taken five years of toil, but Wallace & Gromit are so at home in a full-length feature film that you'd think The Curse of the Were-Rabbit was effortless. Wallace (voiced by the great Peter Sallis) and his canine minder Gromit (as deadpan yet expressive as Buster Keaton) are now in the pest-control business, catching the rabbits threatening the annual giant vegetable competition at Tottington Hall. But when Wallace flicks the wrong switch on his bunny rehabilitation machine, he unleashes a long-eared monster, and no carrot is safe. Aardman's last feature film, Chicken Run, smoothed away much of the animators' idiosyncratic Britishness, but this one has Nick Park's thumbprints all over it: literally, on the Plasticene models, and, metaphorically, on the eccentricity of its world of Heath Robinson, Hammer horror, Alan Bennett and seaside postcards. The jokes come so fast you'll wish the cinema had a rewind button.
07/11 - 09/11 Shop for Jason Aldean Tickets performing in Riverbend Music Center, Shoreline Amphitheatre. Jason Aldean is performing in Cincinnati, Mountain View and Raleigh. Jason Aldean tickets
06/11 Find Concacaf Gold Cup Tickets staging in Reliant Stadium, Rfk Stadium. Concacaf Gold Cup is staging in Houston, Washington and Pasadena. Concacaf Gold Cup tickets
03/12 - 06/11 Buy Lion King Tickets playing in Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts, Mandalay Bay. Lion King is playing in New Orleans, Las Vegas and Dayton. Lion King tickets
And even though Lady Tottington is voiced by Helena Bonham Carter and her caddish suitor by Ralph Fiennes, the celebrities don't overshadow the characters. You'd be crackers to miss it.Godzilla was made in 1954, but this is the first time an original, uncut print of the classic Japanese monster movie has been released in the UK. Notwithstanding the radioactive reptile's wobbly rubber costume, the trampling of Tokyo is surprisingly affecting, especially in a year of hurricanes and earthquakes, and the film's anti-war, anti-nuclear politics are writ as large as Godzilla himself.An opening caption declares that Domino is "based on a true story - sort of", and the emphasis should be on the "sort of".The true part is that an ex-model named Domino Harvey did indeed rebel against her privileged upbringing in London and Beverly Hills by becoming a bounty hunter The not-true part is pretty much everything else. Instead of investigating why Harvey (a plummy Keira Knightley) made her career choice, the film drops her into a fictional, labyrinthine plot about reality TV, the Mafia, sex addiction, goldfish, Afghanistan and The Jerry Springer Show. It's as if Richard "Donnie Darko" Kelly had drafted a script aping Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie, and then squeezed in Harvey at the last minute. Not to be outdone, Tony Scott warps the film into a dizzying blur. If he had so little respect for Harvey's actual story, why did he bother with it?It's 1979, and a US Corporal (Jason Biggs) is bound for Hawaii when a screw-up sends him instead to a military base in Greenland, where the ice and isolation are slowly driving the troops mad. This adaptation of John Griesemer's novel, No One Thinks Of Greenland, marches to the same beat as Catch-22 and M*A*S*H.
It's attractively shot, and intriguingly acted by Biggs, Jeremy Northam and Natascha McElhone, but it does so little with its various, disparate elements - satire, romance, mystery - that the point of the project seems to have got lost in the snow.. One redeeming facet of the American mainstream is that, despite received wisdom, it's nothing like as predictable as you think. Who would have expected a big-budget entertainment that concludes by telling us in so many words that the biggest arms dealer in the world is the President of the United States? In theory, Andrew Niccol's Lord of War ought to be big news, as provocative a piece of multiplex-friendly shit-stirring as, say, Fahrenheit 9/11. But it's a lost opportunity - overextended razzle-dazzle that flounders in self-importance and inflated production values.
RSS Feed
Twitter