Film Reviews
ALSO RELEASED Predators (15) 106min ●●●●● Half decent return to B-movie form for the Predator franchise in which a group of elite warriors are hunted by members of the merciless alien race. The above average cast (Adrien Brody, Alice Braga, Danny Trejo and Topher Grace) and knowing, darkly intuitive direction from Hungarian Nimrod Antal (Kontroll, Vacancy, Armoured) really helps pass the time. General release from Thu 8 Jul. Inception (12A) 146min Christopher Nolan’s brain power sci-fi starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Unable to review at time of going to press. Will be reviewed at www.list.co.uk. General release from Fri 16 Jul. Skeletons (15) 94min ●●●●● Inventive British black comedy about a couple of closet skeleton- chasing exorcists and the secrets that lie beneath their curious profession. Jason Issacs, Ed Gaughan, Andrew Buckley and the lovely Paprika Steen star. Winner of the Michael Powell Award for Best New British Feature Film at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival. Cameo, Edinburgh from Fri 9–Thu 15 Jul (matinees only).
TEEN FANTASY THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE (12A) 124min ●●●●● A mere eight months after the previous installment hit cinemas, Eclipse, the third episode in the teenage Twilight franchise, continues the series’ tradition of breathless, toothless romance.
Melissa Rosenberg’s tightly-wound emotional trajectory of the central love-triangle. It’s easy to mock the po-faced dialogue the characters spout about eternal love and fighting forever, but director David Slade (Hard Candy, 30 Days of Night) invests the proceedings with the same trashy gravitas that infused previous episode New Moon.
After a spate of killings in Seattle, Bella (Kristen Will Bella ever decide between Edward and Jacob?
Stewart) gets word that vengeful vampire queen Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard) is raising an army of the undead. Previously rivals for Bella’s affections, vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson) and werewolf Jacob (Taylor Lautner) put aside their differences and vow to protect her in the oncoming rumble between vampires and werewolves.
The Twilight Saga has never rung many bells as groundbreaking cinema, but its growing momentum as a cultural phenomenon lies in Kristen Stewart’s empathetic performance as Bella, and screenwriter
Will humans, werewolves and vampires ever get along? Will Jacob ever find a shirt he can wear without whipping it off? These questions may seem profoundly unimportant, but the fun of the Twilight movies is seeing them treated like they were of life-shattering importance. As always, the ending is little more than a trailer for the next episode, two-parter Breaking Dawn, but then, the alchemy of Stephanie Meyer’s books is how she makes such minor manoeuverings seem like high drama. (Eddie Harrison) ■ General release from Fri 9 Jul.
DRAMA WILD GRASS (12A) 104min ●●●●●
For the first time in a career spanning over five decades, the 87-year-old French director Alain Resnais has directly adapted a novel. Based on Christian Gailly’s L’Incident, Wild Grass turns out to be a playfully surreal tale of amour fou, in which love propels its characters to behave in the strangest ways.
The starting point is the theft of a bright yellow handbag belonging to the flame- haired dentist Marguerite (Sabine Azéma). Later, her discarded red wallet is discovered in a Parisian underground car park by fiftysomething Georges, a married father of two grown-up children, who seems to have plenty of time on his hands. When Georges catches sight of the photograph on Marguerite’s pilot licence – her hobby, it transpires, is flying restored vintage aircraft – his romantic fantasies are triggered, and he seeks to track down the female aviator.
Thanks in part to the interventions of a mysterious policeman (Mathieu Amalric) and Marguerite’s eccentric dental colleague (Emmanuelle Devos), Wild Grass keeps heading off in all sorts of unexpected directions, its giddiness reflected in the swooping and soaring camerawork of Eric Gautier. Vibrant primary colours and non-naturalistic lighting patterns fill the screen, heightening the mood of irrationality, while the voiceover switches between an unreliable third-person narrator (Edouard Baer) and interior monologues. Characterisations are distinguished by their ambiguity: does Georges really have a serious criminal past or is that another figment of his over-active imagination? The ‘wild grass’ of the title provides one of the film’s recurrent visual motifs: clusters of weeds poke through concrete surfaces, symbolising how passions can flourish even in orderly worlds. (Tom Dawson) ■ Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Tue 13–Mon 18 Jul.
52 THE LIST 8–22 Jul 2010