FILM ... with Tim Milfull
The Ghost Writer (MA)
Director: Roman Polanski
Stars: Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams Rating: 3/5
128-minutes, screening from 12 August.
Roman Polanski has led a life dogged by tragedy and controversy: escaping Nazi persecution as a child; losing his wife Sharon Tate to Charles Manson’s lunatic gang; a conviction for statutory rape; and a decades-long exile from Hollywood – although the latter might be considered by some as a blessing in disguise.
While the most recent scandal about his house arrest and failed extradition attempt to face the rape conviction again may have been subverted by Swiss authorities, new charges have arisen over another alleged statutory rape in the seventies.
Opinions might be divided about Polanksi’s guilt or innocence on these charges, but few argue about his talent for cinema, with classics like Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, and The Pianist cementing his reputation as a master filmmaker. This is why his latest film is such a disappointment.
Based on a well-received Robert Harris novel – The Ghost – and adapted by Polanski in collaboration with the novelist, the film tells the story of a talented anonymous writer (Ewan McGregor) hired to ghost write the autobiographer of former British Prime Minister, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan).
Hidden away in the soulless, concrete mansion of his publisher, The Ghost collaborates with his subject to redraft the manuscript left behind by Lang’s former confidante, who committed suicide under mysterious circumstances.
The more he digs into Lang’s past, The Ghost finds more and more mysteries, especially regarding the ex-PM’s grumpy, opinionated wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams). When charges of war crimes come to light out of Lang’s term of office, The Ghost realises he might be in over his head.
Ostensibly, The Ghost Writer has all the hallmarks of a Polanski classic: very good performances, an evocative score, and a series of excellent locations shot with a moody, unsettling aesthetic. Unfortunately, Polanski’s script lets The Ghost Writer down, failing to bring the characters to life or believable suspense to the narrative.
Keeping up with the Smiths
Killers (M)
Director: Robert Luketic
Stars: Ashton Kutcher, Katherine Heigl, Tom Selleck
Rating: 3/5
93-minutes, now screening
Featuring one of the lamest posters in recent times, Aussie expat Robert Luketic’s Killers doesn’t promise much in the action-comedy stakes. Ashton Kutcher has a reputation as a lightweight, with a career top-heavy with unremarkable film and television; he’s probably more famous for his Twitter correspondence and a long-term relationship with uber-cougar Demi Moore.
And Katherine Heigl has a somewhat more consolidated career, working on Grey’s Anatomy and in an on-again-off-again career with Judd Apatow. In Killers, Luketic teams up these two with a collection of other B- listers, including Tom Selleck and the excellent character actor, Catherine O’Hara as a vaguely dysfunctional middle-American family. Heigl plays Jen Kornfeldt, whose series of disastrous relationships have left her a quivering mess. On a holiday with her parents (Selleck and O’Hara), she meets Mr Perfection, Spencer (Kutcher) who sweeps her off her feet. Three years later, the pair has a beautiful home, and an attractive circle of friends, even if Jen’s parents are a little eccentric. But trouble comes to town when Spencer’s old career returns to haunt him; suddenly, there’s a $20-million bounty on his head, and Jen is reeling with the revelation that her husband was once a contract killer. Robert Luketic directed a winner in Legally Blonde back in 2001, and ever since has made some pretty unremarkable mainstream films, including another Heigl vehicle, The Ugly Truth. Killers may not be as consistently clever as Grosse Point Blank, but it is a serviceable Hollywood action-comedy, and surprisingly, more believable than that other assassin-flick, Mr & Mrs Smith.
THE BINGE
One hump or two?
Humpday (MA15+)
Change of Plans (M)
North Face (M)
Five Minutes of Heaven (M)
All now available from Madman
The premise of Humpday involves a Seattle tradition of a home-made pornography festival writ large, as two former college buddies reunite, and make a drunken pledge to film a porno about two straight fellers having sex.
Writer-director Lynn Shelton tells a very believable and occasionally hilarious story about relationships and the lengths two guys will go to in the search for artistic expression.
Daniele Thompson’s Change of Plans is also about mini-midlife crises, as a group of friends and strangers sit down for a dinner party one evening, and agree to meet again a year later. Written by Thompson and her husband, this film features some elaborate relational machinations and an excellent series of confrontations and affairs.
With North Face, writer-director Philip Stözl departs from his music video background to tell the true story of two attempts to climb the north face of The Eiger, a treacherous mountain marked as the last of the challenges of the European Alps. Featuring some excellent performances, dramatic action sequences, breathtaking scenery, and unsettling subtexts of Nazi rhetoric in the lead-up to the Second World War, North Face is an excellent example of an action flick. In Five Minutes of Heaven (above), Oliver Hirschbiegel (Downfall)and writer, Guy Hibbert imagine what it would be like to sit two grown men down together four decades after one as a child witnessed the other murdering his older brother in an act of sectarian violence during the Troubles of northern Ireland.
Based on Hibbert’s close consultation with both real-life characters, and featuring some remarkable performances from James Nesbitt and Liam Neeson, Five Minutes... is a confronting examination of truth and reconciliation.
