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No Reservations

No Reservations stars Catherine Zeta Jones, who plays Kate, a professional culinary master (but without the foul language of Gordon Ramsay). Kate is a control freak. She is the head chef of a classy restaurant, and has an iron grip on all aspects of her kitchen, her employees, the food that goes out of the swinging doors, even the ingredients that go into the food (she gets up at 5.00am to select that day’s fish at the market). She is so impeccable, it’s untrue. (Quite literally untrue, if you have ever worked in a kitchen, you would know you cannot leave a shift in pristine chef whites!)

Then her iron grip is rendered utterly useless, as a tragic car accident leaves her as the custodian of her niece, Zoe (Abigail Breslin). Having never married or had children of her own, she finds the unpredictability of Zoe’s bereavement a real challenge against the order of her workplace.

When she returns to work, with her emotions in turmoil, she finds her replacement, Nick (Aaron Eckhart), playing opera music, and her kitchen in disarray. Predictably, she is not happy, but her niece, who has ceased eating completely, warms to this messy stranger. There is a lovely scene – which shows how contrary kids can be – where Nick makes himself some pasta, leaving it on the side for the starving Zoe to pick up and nibble.

This difficult storyline is played beautifully by the excellent, heart-wrenching performance of Abigail Breslin, who also starred in the acclaimed Little Miss Sunshine. Although I do admire Zeta Jones, her hoarse whispering was slightly annoying. However, this was more than compensated for by the adorable presence of Nick, a lovely guy who is compellingly relaxed, as free as a bird, and as delicious to look at as some of the food that he creates! Look out for the African pizza buffet scene – my favourite in the film.

No Reservations is out in UK cinemas on 31 August.

[Reviewed and posted by KC]

The Dam Busters

One of the best-loved of British war movies, The Dam Busters has been studied, imitated and even parodied (in a justly renowned Carling Black Label advert); yet while its tone can occasionally seem quaint to modern viewers, its hold on the emotions remains strong. For this,thank a raft of no-nonsense performances, Michael Anderson's unfussy direction, and Eric Coates' stirring, martial score.

On the one hand, it's a docudrama detailing the conception of the so-called "bouncing bomb" by British scientist Dr Barnes Wallis (Michael Redgrave), a loyal if somewhat abstracted boffin, who seemed to spend almost as much time battling the scepticism and disbelief of his superiors at Whitehall, as devising ways to combat the Nazis.

Wallis was charged with a mission crucial to the Allied war effort: to destroy the dams of the Ruhr region, which harnessed the energy of the Moehne, Eder and Sorbe rivers – and thereby, to paralyse the German heartland. His solution? A new kind of explosive-delivery system, one which would skip over the water, avoiding the protective torpedo nets, then sink just before detonation, to ensure greater devastation.

It is, at least for its first half, chiefly an inventor's story, and the film's narrative proceeds through the usual conventions of the genre. There's the "eureka" moment, as the idea is grasped (in this case, Wallis shooting marbles across a bathtub of water), the inevitable setbacks (bomb-casings must be re-designed, instruments radically refined), and finally, the great, apotheosising triumph, in which both adversity and the enemy are overcome.

UK box-office August 24-26

After a washed-out summer, the sun shone on August Bank Holiday Weekend, which is rarely good news for the box office. Many films fell by more than half compared to the previous weekend’s takings, and specialist releases in particular struggled to motivate audiences away from gardens and barbecues, and into cinemas.

The Bourne Ultimatum retained its crown, dropping 46% for an 11-day total of £12.93 million. With Bank Holiday Monday’s takings added in, its cumulative total now stands at £13.82 million. In comparison, The Bourne Supremacy had reached £6.14 million after its second weekend, on its way to a total of £12 million. The Bourne Ultimatum has already taken more than its predecessor did in its entire theatrical run.

Knocked Up landed at number two in the chart, with £1.58 million, and £2.06 million including Bank Holiday Monday. This is the biggest opening for a film rated 15 or higher since March’s 300, and the biggest opening for a 15-rated comedy since February’s Hot Fuzz. Still, after huge hype, strong reviews and a big marketing spend by backers Universal, it’s evident that the sunshine did depress the box office on the picture.

Bollywood produced its latest hit with Hey Baby (aka Heyy Babyy), a Hindi take on Three Men and a Baby, set in Australia. The film opened on 48 screens with £229,000, or £290,000 including Monday takings. It remains to be seen whether Hey Baby can pass previous 2007 hits such as Namaste London and Salaam-E-Ishq, and become the first Bollywood release of the year to break the £1 million box office barrier.

In the arthouse sector, Lady Chatterley opened ambitiously wide on 51 screens, but failed to crack £1,000 screen average. The acclaimed French language film took just under £49,000, although a strong performance on Bank Holiday Monday took that total to £84,000.

Western Seraphim Falls, starring Pierce Brosnan and Liam Neeson, expanded from an initial release in Ireland to a nationwide rollout on 55 screens. The film took a disappointing £20,000 over the three-day weekend. London-lowlife thriller Sugarhouse debuted on 43 screens, with a similarly unsatisfying £18,000, and £23,000 over the four days. Timely disaster thriller Flood, which neatly sidestepped critical appraisal by avoiding showing to the press, opened on a single screen, grossing £3,200 over the four-day weekend.

Overall, the top 15 films were up 21% on the equivalent weekend from 2006, when You, Me & Dupree topped the chart. However, although the top films a year ago fell short of this week’s Bourne Ultimatum and Knocked Up, it was a different story at the bottom of the chart. While the top-heavy nature of the current box-office landscape ensures the number 15 film (Chak De India) took just £29,500 at the weekend, a year ago the number 15 film (Superman Returns) took £126,000. Expressed another way, while this weekend the top film took 97 times as much as the film at the bottom of the top 15, a year ago the equivalent multiple was just 13 times as much.

Hallam Foe

Hannah McGill, the new artistic director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, must be counting her blessings that in her first year the perfect title was available for the opening night of her programme. With Hallam Foe, David Mackenzie returns to the festival that premiered his feature debut The Last Great Wilderness in 2002, and which opened with his 2003 film Young Adam. On top of that, Hallam Foe is largely set in the Scottish capital. It’s rare to find a high-profile film of such quality that also ticks the rare box of civic pride.

Mackenzie’s four-feature career has been a bumpy ride. The Last Great Wilderness, co-written and starring his brother Alastair (star of TV’s Monarch of the Glen), was an appropriately low-budget, lo-fi debut: a mismatched-buddy road movie that took an unexpected swerve when the two male protagonists hole up at a remote Scottish hotel populated by a variety of improbable eccentrics.

Young Adam, starring Ewan McGregor, Emily Mortimer, Tilda Swinton and Peter Mullan, was a notably more polished follow-up. Based on a novel by Alexander Trocchi, its star cast and provocative sexy trappings could not disguise its intrinsically uncommercial essence – audience members looking for points of emotional access had a hard time locating them – and box-office did not quite match the pre-release buzz and critical acclaim.

myfilms talks to Gary Love (Director) and Oliver Milburn (Producer) of the British crime thriller Sugarhouse

In Sugarhouse, a middle-class City accountant (Steven Mackintosh) makes a deal with a hyperactive crack-head (Ashley Walters) to buy some merchandise. But when he discovers that the merchandise has actually been stolen from the feared local villain (Andy Serkis), things start to get messy.

myfilms:   What attracted you to Sugarhouse when you read the script?   

                                             
Gary Love: The Green Light!!! No seriously, I liked the claustrophobic feel of the piece, I thought the characters were very interesting and they all had well formed journeys.

myfilms: You have known Dominic Leyton since school and worked with him closely on the script for Sugarhouse. How did this help in getting the film made?

Oliver Milburn:  It helped in the sense that I was completely immersed in the script, and wholeheartedly convinced of it’s worth – something that is not always the case with producers. So when it came to meetings with investors, I could pitch the film as both a commercial opportunity, and a serious piece of cinema.

myfilms:  How would you compare directing for TV to making your first feature film?

Gary Love: Pretty much the same in the actual job of directing, although in TV there are a lot of producers who are second thinking what the other channel are doing rather than making the best programme possible, and that makes for Hybrid TV which makes for a very diluted product, sadly. I love working in TV but good quality producers are few and far between.

myfilms: How has your role as executive producer (Subterrain 2001) compared with producing Sugarhouse?   

Oliver Milburn:  On Subterrain I partly funded the film and sat in the background. On Sugarhouse I worked on the script, on finding a director and funding, casting, hiring crew, finding locations, pre-production, production, post production…it goes on. An executive role is very relaxed, in comparison.

myfilms:  Sugarhouse is based on the stage play ‘Collision’ by Dominic Leyton, who also wrote the script for the film. Were there any challenges involved making a play work on the big screen? 

      
Gary Love: Yes, trying to take out the extensive dialogue that a stage play needs to explain a scenario and trying to turn those speeches into actions and feelings, so the film doesn’t feel like it’s wall-to-wall dialogue.

myfilms: You are an experienced actor yourself.  Did you have a clear idea of the actors you wanted to work with or was this decided in the auditions?               

Oliver Milburn:  I had a clear idea of the type of actor I wanted to use, and I think Gary was of roughly the same opinion. Certainly all three of our leads were at the very top of our lists, but the final choices can only be made once you have seen lots of the right type of people. In the end, it was fairly obvious who should play the roles, and thankfully they all said yes. It was fun being on the other side of the room, though.

myfilms:   Why do you think people should go to see Sugarhouse?

Gary Love: Because it’s a great slice of London Life and it has something for everyone.

myfilms:  Who is your favourite character in the film and why?

Oliver Milburn: I actually don’t have one. I think that to separate them away from the rest of the pack doesn’t work. They all have something to say, and they all get through those few hours with an intensity that is astonishing.

Sugarhouse is out now in UK cinemas.

[posted by HC]

The Wicker Man

The best loved of British horror films, 1973’s The Wicker Man wasn’t made by the storied house of fright, Hammer Films, and strictly speaking it isn’t even a horror film. Fundamentally it’s an intriguingly bizarre, wildly original mystery thriller (by Anthony Shaffer, who also wrote Sleuth and Frenzy). Only in the final moments does it actually horrify, but then so completely – and so distressingly believably –  that the last scene is never forgotten.

Shaffer played on the dread image of folk who dwell on remote Scottish islands, who according to the movies are either lovably canny, whiskey glugging eccentrics or primitive pagans. Summerisle, the scene of The Wicker Man’s nature-worshipping crazies, is deceptively pleasant and balmy, although as soon as Sgt. Howie (Edward Woodward) of the West Highland Constabulary arrives there are hints all is not well. Humourless, strait-laced Howie, a resolute copper and a devoutly religious man, is investigating the anonymously reported disappearance of a 12-year-old girl, Rowan Morrison. While the unwelcoming islanders insist they don’t know the lassie, he’s equally displeased that everything he’s given to eat comes out of tins – in an agricultural community, in May. Come on, man, it’s obvious the crops failed!

What should make Howie even more alert is that all of Summerisle, from Christopher Lee’s suave-sinister laird (a sensationally macabre figure in drag at the climax) to the giggling schoolchildren, are obviously in on some big joke at his expense. No matter how many times you have seen this film you want to shout out at him to get back in his seaplane and get away. But the entire film depends on Howie’s faith in God and the authority of the law, and his conviction that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

UK box-office August 17-19

The summer blockbuster season, which kicked off in May with Spider-Man 3, fired its final bolt at the weekend with The Bourne Ultimatum. And the last of the season’s big hitters gave cinema owners plenty of cheer as it romped away with a £6.55 million opening weekend, including Thursday previews of £1.24 million. This compares with a £2.72 million opening in 2004 for The Bourne Supremacy, and £2.15 million in 2002 for The Bourne Identity.

When Bratz opened two weeks ago on just $4 million in the US, forecasts for the toy spinoff in the UK took a knock. But an opening weekend tally of £1.25 million, including previews, suggests it’s not inconceivable that the film might end up grossing more in the UK than in the US, where it will struggle to pass $10 million by the end of its run.

Hollywood fare totally dominated the box-office chart, with not a single non-mainstream or Bollywoood film in the Top Ten. Biggest new specialist release is New Zealand indie romcom Eagle Vs Shark, which landed at number 15 with £48,000. Considering the wide release of 70 prints, and lowly screen average of £684, this must be considered a disappointment.

Henry V

Well over 400 films have been made of William Shakespeare’s plays –  ‘straight’ productions of the original texts, contemporary re-workings, animations, musicals and foreign language adaptations – since 1899, when film pioneer William Kennedy made a four-minute snippet of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s King John. Ever since, tackling the Bard on screen has proved irresistible not only to renowned theatre Shakespeareans – Laurence, Lord Olivier, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ian McKellen, Kenneth Branagh – but to an array of actors from Marlon Brando to Leonardo DiCaprio and Mekhi Phifer (as a basketball-playing version of Othello). Among homages and variations: robot lovers Romie-0 and Julie-8 (1979), teen romcom classic 10 Things I Hate about You (1999), Cole Porter’s musical Kiss Me Kate (1953), horror gem Theatre of Blood (1973) in which crazed thespian Vincent Price murders critics by Shakespearean methods (infamously serving Robert Morley’s hack to his pet poodles a la Titus Andronicus), and the Oscar-winning charmer fictionalising the writing and rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare in Love. And they just keep coming... proving that the world’s greatest writer is ever relevant on the human condition. Plus he’s out of copyright, so they don’t have to pay the author.

Of all these screen adaptations, from many countries and in many styles, Henry V, the first of Laurence Olivier’s own several Shakespearean films – while his moody, brooding noir 1948 Hamlet is forever superb and his Richard III and Othello riveting records of landmark theatre performances – remains the most masterful and engrossing in the English language. (Akira Kurosawa’s gripping 1957 samurai Macbeth, Throne of Blood, is its rival claimant for the accolade of Greatest Shakespeare Movie Ever.) Filming during the Second World War, on-leave officer Olivier squeezed the maximum patriotic juice out of this stirring tale of war, emphasising the young warrior king’s venture into manhood, kingship and conquest as a heady, morale-boosting story of courage, heart and hope. 

UK box office August 10-12

The frantic summer blockbuster season paused for breath at the weekend, with the release of the only-moderate-sized Rush Hour 3 last Friday, in advance of the last of the season’s biggies, The Bourne Ultimatum, arriving this Thursday. Still, Rush Hour’s backers will be pleased with the UK result. While Rush Hour 3 failed to match up to its predecessor at the US box office (it took $49.10 million, compared with $67.41 million for Rush Hour 2 back in 2001), in the UK the situation was reversed. Rush Hour 3 opened here on £2.73 million, compared with a £2.29 million debut for its predecessor.

Rival newcomers Surf’s Up and License to Wed were way behind. Animated penguin tale Surf’s Up suffered from following recent penguin-themed hit Happy Feet, and boogie-boarded its way to a disappointing £601,000 from nearly 400 screens. License to Wed, a romantic comedy featuring Robin Williams as a loopy vicar, was left at the altar with just £268,000 from 201 cinemas.

Waitress, a winning indie flick that followed acclaim at Sundance with word-of-mouth success at US cinemas this summer, stumbled at its first outing in the UK. Despite major promotion from backers Twentieth Century Fox, the baking-themed drama managed a not-so-magical £106,000 from 71 theatres. More impressive was Paul Schrader’s The Walker, starring Woody Harrelson, with £44,600 from just 20 sites.

Billy Liar

Social realism met satirical fantasy in this much-loved, bittersweet comedy from 1963, a singular classic and a landmark among the influential ‘kitchen sink’ dramas of the British New Wave. Scripted by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall (from their successful stage adaptation of Waterhouse’s novel), it’s the tale of a devious Everyman who has the ambition, but not the character or energy, to escape his dull life – except in his vivid daydreams. The film is grounded in director John Schlesinger and cinematographer Denys Coop’s detailed presentation of the ‘ee, it’s grim oop North’ miserabilism popular in British post-War cinema while gleefully signalling the change in the air as the Sixties began to Swing.   

Yorkshire lad and one of the Angry Young Men with a difference, Billy Fisher (Tom Courtenay) is a discontented clerk at funeral directors Shadrach and Duxbury’s. He is also a slyly compelling mix of the innocent fabulist with the self-absorbed, pathological liar. The Dickensian atmosphere of his work environment and his testy home life (with parents Wilfrid Pickles and Mona Washbourne, and Ethel Griffies’ gran Florence) are scarcely alleviated by his lethargic amorous entanglement between two demanding fiancées (Helen Fraser as bourgeois Barbara and Gwendolyn Watts as brassy Rita) who are unaware they are sharing Billy’s limited attention span and one engagement ring.