The Time Traveler’s Wife (M)
Director: Robert Schwentke
Stars: Eric Bana, Rachel McAdams Rating: 3.5/5
107-minutes, now screening
Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife was always going to be one of those popular novels that would have fans worrying about film adaptations, and I must admit I was a little concerned when I heard the news that it was coming to the screen.
But after last week’s preview, my fears for Niffenegger’s weepy spec-fic novel were ultimately unfounded. What seemed to be an odd choice in Eric Bana to play the unfortunate Henry DeTamble turns out to be an inspiration on the part of director Robert Schwentke, as is the casting of Rachel McAdams as Henry’s long-suffering lover Clare.
For the uninitiated, Bana’s Henry is afflicted with an extremely rare genetic disorder that sees him fading out of one time-zone and reappearing in others. He has no control over his ‘chrono-displacement’, and as a consequence drops in and out of the lives of those he loves, and in and out of his own life – the latter jumps feature in some intriguingly mind-bending sequences.
My memories of the novel are predominantly poignant and touching, and I had to be reminded by a friend that Niffenegger’s work was also very quirky and amusing, and Bruce Joel Rubin’s screenplay very cleverly evokes the funny and whimsical side of Henry’s condition in the first two acts, while the third offers a quite satisfying impression of the downsides of knowing the circumstances behind your death and the implications it might have for those left behind.
I wasn’t quite sobbing into tissues kike the half-dozen women in front of me, but I think there was at least one bit of dust in my eye at the end of this film.
***
Are the days numbered ... for disaster flicks?
2012 (M)
Director: Roland Emmerich
Stars: John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Woody Harrelson
Rating: 3/5
151-minutes, screening from November 19
There are certain films that require you to switch off all needs for credibility and reality as you walk into the cinema, and I’m not talking about pure science fiction or fantasy films.
These big-budget blockbuster movies like Armageddon and Deep Impact, see really dodgy science take the front seat and steer us into weirdly familiar and sometimes unnerving territory, and subsequently scare the pants off those who are unable or unwilling to think critically about what they’re watching.
And writer-director Roland Emmerich is the King of the Un-credible, consistently buying into the unfounded fears of our Western zeitgeist with films like The Day After Tomorrow – with its ridiculous climate change fear-mongering – and rewriting history in 10,000 B.C., his unconscionable compression of humanity.
Emmerich’s latest CGI extravaganza, 2012, is no exception, drawing on a mish-mash of Mayan mythology and mutant science to destroy the world.
According to conspiracy theorists, the meso-Americans allegedly predicted the end of the world in 2012, and in Emmerich’s universe, an unfortunate Indian physicist has discovered that solar flares have sent ‘mutant’ neutrinos hurtling into the Earth’s core to trigger a reaction that is essentially microwaving our planet’s centre.
Right… that’s the dodgy science out of the road – let’s get down to destroying civilisation, and California is first on the Doomsday list. Thankfully, the stubborn Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) convinces the US government to prepare a contingency plan to save some of us, and Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) just happens to be in all the right places, and equipped with the requisite skills to bring his loved ones to safety just by the skin of their teeth.
At an unreasonable 151-minutes, and crammed with some very dodgy CGI and action sequences, this is the kind of obscenely bloated blockbuster that’ll rake the box office dollars in.
Imagine what would happen if Emmerich and Michael Bay could do if they got together!
THE BINGE
La Luna (R) now available through Madman Entertainment The Young One (MA15+) now available through Madman Entertainment Life’s a Zoo (M) now available through Madman Entertainment
Tackling one of life’s taboos
Two classics from Madman’s Directors Suite to start off this week’s Binge, and Bernardo Bertolucci’s La Luna is a very interesting choice.
Jill Clayburgh plays renowned opera diva, Caterina Silveri, recently widowed and facing the reality of raising her teenage son Joe (Matthew Barry) herself. When mother and son relocate from New York to Italy for an opera performance, the boy falls in with the wrong crowd and begins using heroin.
This controversial film features disturbing performances from both Clayburgh and Barry acting out one of society’s less-discussed taboos.
In The Young One, Spanish director Luis Buñuel makes a departure from his surrealist roots and courts controversy on US soil, investigating a separate set of taboos involving child molestation and racism, as a young, black jazz musician (Bernie Hamilton) flees accusations of rape to hide on a remote island in the Deep South.
There, he meets the naïve and recently orphaned teenager Evalyn (Key Meersman) and her bigoted, self-appointed guardian, Miller (Zachary Scott), whose intentions towards Evalyn are less than honourable.
If incest, racism, and kiddie-fiddling seem like too much to contend with, perhaps you should check out Life’s a Zoo, which has its own taboos to deal with, but in a much less serious light – think SBS’s cartoon series Drawn Together or Peter Jackson’s early queerness, Meet the Feebles. In this TV series, a version of the Big Brother house is filled with messed-up clay-mation animals, each with a set of perverted peccadilloes, and as expected, the sparks begin to fly.
