In cinemas Thursday [M]

Director: Allen Coulter

Runtime: 113mins

As the credits rolled at the end of a recent screening of Remember Me, I sat with two other film critics and chatted about the film. We argued about certain elements and plot developments of the film and what we perceived as various faults, until I observed that this was one of the rare occasions where we were still in the cinema after the lights came up – normally, people are bolting for the door as soon as the credits appear. There must have been something compelling about the film if we were still talking about it.

Well ... forgive me if I avoid spoilers here; this film is better discussed with people who have seen it, rather than those who are considering heading in. There’s a twist at the very end of Remember Me that I didn’t see as such – I picked that particular plot development in the opening scenes, and then spent the rest of the film working out how the characters would reach that point – but everyone else in the cinema had been surprised at the climax. So director, Allen Coulter, and first-time screenwriter Will Fetters must have done something right.

Remember Me opens as a young girl witnesses the mugging and murder of her mother on a train station. Ten years later, we meet university student, Tyler (Robert Pattinson) as he glowers through his education, supplementing a meagre student income by working in a bookshop alongside a highly horny best friend and room-mate, Aidan (Tate Ellington). Tyler is estranged from his corporate lawyer father, Charles (Pierce Brosnan), and fiercely protective of his precocious younger sister, Caroline (Ruby Jerins), who has her own problems at school.

After a chance, brutal encounter with cranky police detective, Neil (Chris Cooper), Tyler and Aidan realise that Neil’s daughter, Ally (Emilie de Ravin) is a fellow student, and Tyler takes Aidan’s challenge to exact some vengeance. But this sassy young woman is more than the boys realised, and Tyler soon finds himself falling in love.

There are some good performances here, with the ever-reliable Chris Cooper excellent as the over-protective father, and Pattinson momentarily lifting himself out of the sulky mode that has made him famous in Twilight and proving that he can actually act; this is only momentary, actually, as he inevitably resumes sulking. But despite Coulter’s considerable experience directing episodes of tense television programmes like The Sopranos and The X-Files, I couldn’t help feeling that the denouement of Remember Me was a little too contrived.

***½

TIM MILFULL

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In cinemas Thursday [M]

Director: Paul Greengrass

Runtime: 114mins

When I heard Matt Damon was going to be teamed up again with Greg Kinnear for another movie, it turned out I was the only one hoping for a sequel to Stuck On You. In fact people were more excited over Matt Damon working with Paul Greengrass after their success on the Bourne Series. In all seriousness though, those of you who have seen Greengrass and Damon’s work previously will know what to expect, Dave Stratton is going to hate this movie.

Based on Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s non-fiction book, (Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone) the film revolves around Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Damon) who is in Iraq looking for WMD on dodgy Intel. Meanwhile CIA Bureau chief of Baghdad Gordon Brown (Brendan Gleeson) is butting heads with Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear) on whether they should enlist the help of a man named Al Rawi (Igal Naor) one of Saddam Hussein’s ex-army chiefs to keep the Iraqi people in control.

Miller, frustrated by his mission of looking for bombs he knows aren’t there, is informed by a local Freddy (Khalid Abdalla) that there are highly armed Iraqi citizens meeting up near their site. Taking the initiative, he tasks a squadron to raid the meeting place only to find that Al Rawi himself was at the meeting, and manages to escape. Brown persuades Miller to be re-assigned in order to catch Rawi so that the government can make a deal. Poundstone on the other hands wants him dead, and sends his own unit to go after Rawi.

If you’ve seen the Bourne movies, you’ll know what to expect, frantic camera work, and talking heads moving at breakneck pace trying to get Matt Damon from point A to B. The action is essentially trivial, it can be followed, but it becomes tiresome to watch. The lightning speed editing suits the film, but it does rob it of any emotional connection it hopes to make with the audience, which is fine as the book was also said to be quite clinical in its description.

Where the film earns its stripes is how the plot is coloured in by some fact, thanks to the source material. It also helps the immersion aspect that this is one of very few Iraq War movies that actually looks like it takes place in central Baghdad.

Green Zone is entertaining for the most part, and it doesn’t hit viewers with a message (which is fairly heartfelt) until the end. Films about the Iraq war have been grossly un-watchable until The Hurt Locker, and this, while not nearly as good, is a step in the right direction.

***

ELWOOD LEE

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In cinemas Thursday [M]

Director: Grant Heslov

Runtime: 94mins

When director Grant Heslov and screenwriter Peter Straughan were handed the premise for The Men Who Stare At Goats, for a moment they must have been in filmic nirvana. A true story this weird doesn’t come along that often, and in Hollywood’s never ending hunt for a narrative that hasn’t already been told (at least in cinemas), material like this is close to gold.

Based on the account of the same name by journalist Jon Ronson (and somewhat controversially, uncredited research by documentarian John Sargeant), The Men Who Stare At Goats takes a semi-fictionalised look at the US Army’s experiments in alternative combat – namely, “psychic soldiers”. Directionless journo Bob Wilton (Ewan Macgregor) heads to Kuwait in the hope of finding a story in the early days of the Iraq War. Instead he finds Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), an intense and slightly unhinged contractor who informs Wilton that he was once part of the New Earth Army, an actual special forces unit set up by Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), a soldier who spent years in the ‘70s researching new age philosophies and returned to the army to create ‘Jedi’ warriors able to utilise skills like invisibility and remote viewing in combat situations. Via flashbacks we see Django’s unusual training techniques being embraced by his long-haired recruits, including the weaselly Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey), who envies Cassady’s abilities and wants to see the unit take a more aggressive approach. Back in Iraq, the present day Cassady drags Wilton on a “secret mission”, encountering more than a few of the obstacles you’d expect to find in war zones, and testing Wilton’s belief in his companion’s supposed abilities at every turn. But when they find themselves in a US forces base camp, it seems a bigger test of faith is at hand.

Besides the central absurdity of the premise (the military allowing an LSD-soaked hippy to train superhuman soldiers), Heslov and Straughn have a lot of fun with the ‘Jedi’ references around Ewan “Obi Wan” McGregor. The title of film – which comes from Clooney’s character attempting to stop a goat’s heart by staring at it – even gives rise to a chucklesome “Silence Of The Goats” gag. But that’s the film’s main problem given what it eventually attempts to do, which is to become a critique of American military psychological warfare techniques and the influx of private contractors eager to make a quick dollar in Iraq. The satire isn’t harsh enough to really cut to the heart of the matter, and on the flipside the humour is too quirky to make it an out-and-out gut-buster comedy. That said, Bridges and Clooney are both hilarious in their roles, but one can’t help wondering what creators like the Coen Bros. might have done with the material. Even if you have the most unusual story in the world, it won’t be saved by middling execution.

***

TOPHER HEALY

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In cinemas Thursday [PG]

Director: Tim Burton

Runtime: 109mins

Tim Burton’s Alice isn’t a re-make but a sequel to Lewis Carroll’s beloved books, bringing a teenage Alice (Mia Wasikowska) back to Wonderland to repair the damage done in her absence by the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter). Helping her out, while trying to convince her this isn’t all a repeat of a dream she had when she was younger, are characters like the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), the Caterpillar (Alan Rickman) and, of course, the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp).

Depp is always charming playing these cartoonish fops, this time flip-flopping between a mad lisp and an enraged Scottish brogue as if he’s got multiple personalities. Carter plays the Red Queen as a big-headed homage to Miranda Richardson’s Queen of Hearts from the 1999 version, screeching, “Off with their heads!” constantly. The British character actors roped in to voice the CG cast do a lot of the heavy lifting – as well as the dependable Fry and Rickman there’s Paul Whitehouse from The Fast Show and Matt Lucas from Little Britain. Unfortunately, Wasikowska’s Alice doesn’t have the common-sense bossiness of the character from the books and so doesn’t rail against these mad characters.

As for the story, rather than another surreal picaresque ramble, a generic fantasy plot has been bolted on. You know the one – a chosen one has to fulfil a prophecy by finding a magic sword to kill a dragon with, thus restoring the rightful monarch – and it’s dutifully ticked off step by step here. Well, the dragon is called the Jabberwock, but otherwise it’s by the numbers. Everything in Wonderland, renamed Underland, has been given a name as well, and they’re the kind of sub-Harry Potter names that reinforce the resemblance to a knock-off fantasy novel with a map in the front. The drink that makes Alice shrink is called Pishsalver; the Red Queen lives in Salazen Grum; the Caterpillar’s named Absolem – none of them have the fairytale whimsy or linguistic playfulness of Lewis Carroll.

Visually it’s impressive of course, because it’s Tim Burton with a Disney budget. The Knave of Hearts is a bandy-limbed goth and Tweedledum and Tweedledee are rubber-faced goons. The 3D effects have clearly been tacked on to cash in on the fad, however, and neither add to the spectacle or enrich the backgrounds, which feel familiar. For a story about the triumph of the imagination, it isn’t quite imaginative enough.

**½    

JODY MACGREGOR

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In cinemas Thursday Mar 14 [MA15+]

Director: Paul Middleditch

Runtime: 107mins

When asked about the New Zealand film industry most people immediately think of Peter Jackson, Lord of the Rings, and WETA – Jackson’s new, but very successful kid on the special effects block. But before King Peter broke out with the hobbits and the orcs, he was one of the shining lights in a quiet but very productive little national film industry that regularly pumped out quality films. So, while Jackson’s new, lucrative connections bring production crews from around the world to work in the land of the long white cloud, local industry types use the downtime from making blockbusters to produce an interesting little homegrown crop – think stories like Whalerider, the under-appreciated River Queen, classics like Once Were Warriors, or Emily Barclay’s excellent performance in In My Father’s Den.

And like France and to a lesser extent, Australia, the Kiwi film industry regularly releases competent little dramadies like Separation City. The significance of the title doesn’t really become apparent until the final few minutes of the film, and while the meaning might seem apparent, the emotional punch is no less effective. Paul Middleditch’s film opens on the edge of a spectacular cliff where Simon (Joel Edgerton) and Pam (Danielle Cormack) are getting married. Despite Simon’s confident narration hinting at the hyper-levels of love and lust in their relationship, an undercurrent of mischief and disaster at the ceremony suggests that this union could be rocky.

Seven years later, Simon is a chief advisor to the irascible farmer-turned-pollie Archie (Alan Lovell), Pam is a disillusioned housewife dealing with a horde of kids, and the personal, loving, intimate side of their marriage has become lost in the shadows of domesticity. When Pam welcomes a new friend into her social circle, Simon is instantly revitalised. Katrien (Rhona Mitra) is an exotic breeze in an otherwise mundane existence, touring New Zealand as a cellist in the national orchestra, and returning to Wellington to raise her own family with the boorish but talented painter, Klaus (Thomas Kretschmann). While one marriage is slowly disintegrating, another explodes spectacularly, and when the smoke clears, a bond between Simon and Katrien gradually emerges.

Working with Tom Scott’s often scathing screenplay, and a strong supporting cast including Underbelly star Harry Ronayne as Simon’s particularly unpleasant misanthropist best mate, Les, Middleditch constructs a poignant and often very funny analysis of modern relationships.

**½

TIM MILFULL

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In cinemas Thursday [M]

Director: Tom Ford

Runtime: 101 mins

Should A Single Man’s protagonist George Falconer (Colin Firth), a university professor living in 1962 California, be described as a gay university professor living in 1962 California, it would defeat much of the point of the film. It is the same point shared by the greatest of those films that tell the stories of minorities: that such a focus is at once central and tangential, that the story is both as unique as its human protagonist and as universal as humanity, transcending any false boundary; that just as this film’s title refers to a man not married to a woman, it is also refers to a single man because he lacks his other half.

George, eight months after the death of his lover of 16 years Jim (Matthew Goode), is struggling to uphold his emotional mask for – as the revolver he tucks into his briefcase forewarns – one final day. But the film is not so much about mourning death as it’s about lamenting existential isolation, as one of George’s students reveals in the precocious insight that we are forever trapped within our own bodies and sole experience. Connection, George says, is the only thing that has given his life meaning; love is perhaps nothing more than a brief respite, and George’s life without Jim seems a recurring realisation of this. Where the tangential becomes central is in George’s unnoticed grief – his hidden connection with Jim is necessarily a hidden loss, and this lack of acknowledgement sharpens George’s torment into some cruel existential prank. Even his closest friend Charley (Julianne Moore) speculates that Jim was only a “substitute for a real relationship”.

The film reveals George’s relationship to Jim in generous flashback, triggered by the mundane, from a ringing phone to the act of waking up. As words on the screenplay these scenes would read as cliché, but in his directorial debut, fashion designer-cum-filmmaker Tom Ford makes Jim pervade the film like a hanging spectre, clawing for George’s attentive sorrow. 

The film is based on the Christopher Isherwood novel of the same name (which I have not read) and begins much like the pages of some sprawling work of great American literature, but as characters enter for and exit for single scenes, ideas introduced and left only to linger, the film becomes a reduction to the simple feeling of the human desire for meaning and genuine connection. In this way the film becomes a poignant kind of one-act play.

As a cinematic debut, the film is at times clumsy with an air of film school naïveté, but where Ford succeeds – his capturing of the feeling of a standing-still emotional reeling – he succeeds in measures rarely seen from a first-time filmmaker.

****

PAUL RANKIN

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