destined to have just one group of hardened admirers: travel agents. (James Mottram) ■ General release, Fri 24 Sep. THRILLER THE TOWN (15) 124min ●●●●●
Say what you like about Ben Affleck the actor, as a director and screenwriter he is more than competent. As with his overlooked directorial debut Gone Baby Gone, Affleck has adapted another Boston- set crime novel (Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan) and made use of local non-actors and real settings to create an authentic-feeling, action-packed adventure. The opening bank robbery contains
smart camera work and an eye for detail. Unlike in his first film, Affleck also stars in his picture and at times the dual roles of director and star don’t quite gel, with either his performance being slightly off or the direction not up to the standard of his debut film. Affleck plays Doug MacRay, the leader of a gang of crooks, including his best pal, the ferocious loose cannon Jem (Jeremy Renner). Their friendship is tested when MacRay riskily starts dating an employee (Rebecca Hall) from a bank they’ve robbed. Affleck wants us to side with the bad guys; even though the main cop chasing them is a decent guy played by Mad Men’s Jon Hamm. The characters are interesting but the conventional plot fails to ignite and the James Cagney ending is clichéd and weak. (Kaleem Aftab) ■ General release, Fri 24 Sep. See feature, page 56.
Film REVIEWS ROMANCE/COMEDY EAT PRAY LOVE (PG) 139min ●●●●●
From Nip/Tuck to Glee, director Ryan Murphy has the golden touch when it comes to television. Not so, however, with film. His 2006 adaptation of Augusten Burroughs’ memoir Running With Scissors was a middle-of-the- road misfire and much the same could be said about this take on Elizabeth Gilbert’s hit bestseller, in which the author recounts her year following a painful divorce.
Julia Roberts plays Liz, a New York writer who travels to Italy, India and Indonesia for a therapeutic (and cliché-driven) journey of self- indulgence and self-discovery. First stop Rome, where Liz treats her tummy to some yummy pasta before heading off to an ashram on the sub- continent to clear her mind – or, at least, try to. Finally, she lands in Bali, where she meets and eventually falls for Brazilian divorcee Felipe (Javier Bardem).
While Bardem is decent enough, the men largely get short shrift in the film – from Billy Crudup’s soon-to-be-ex- husband to James Franco’s toy-boy actor that Liz has a brief pre-trip fling with. Only Richard Jenkins scores highly in the ashram segment, with a spot-on turn as a gruff Texan who tries to make Liz look outside her self- obsessed universe. As he was in The Visitor, Jenkins is effortless in his ability to convey emotion.
The same cannot be said for Roberts, though admittedly she has to shoulder the whole film. Perhaps because Gilbert’s own odyssey feels so superficial, Roberts’ performance echoes this – it’s all surface tears and smiles. With its excessive running time, this bloated travelogue is
58 THE LIST 23 Sep–7 Oct 2010
THRILLER/DRAMA WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS (12A) 132min ●●●●●
There is something comfortingly old school about Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. It has all the fancy moves, dazzling montage sequences and polish of a classic Hollywood melodrama. This could be one of those pressure-cooker boardroom films from the Eisenhower era like Executive Suite, A Woman’s World or The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Glamorous New York locations and sharp designer clothes testify to a world of conspicuous consumption where ‘greed is good’ is no longer one man’s mantra but a generation’s way of life. Just for sheer, slick professionalism it is irresistible.
Stone’s 1987 original was one of the defining movies of the Reagan era that won a Best Actor Oscar for Michael Douglas. The sequel is unlikely to match that legacy but is an honourable continuation of the Gordon Gekko story even if the impact is dulled by the notion that the global economic meltdown was also a terrible inconvenience for the growing romance between Gekko’s estranged daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan) and her market trader boyfriend Jake (an impressive Shia LaBeouf).
The film begins with Gekko released from prison after serving his
sentence for insider trading. His possessions include a mobile phone the size of the Empire State Building. How times have changed. There is a good deal of fun in discovering if the wily old leopard has really changed his spots as he publishes Is Greed Good? and warns of an impending catastrophe in the American financial system. Is he really humbled by his fall from grace? Has a topsy turvy America transformed him into the one voice of sanity in a Wall Street where folly rules unopposed? Douglas is as charismatic as ever and is surrounded by a sturdy A-list
ensemble that includes Susan Sarandon, Josh Brolin, 94 year-old veteran Eli Wallach and Frank Langella as the quiet voice of integrity in a world where everyone is too busy making money to realise that the economy is blindly drifting towards an iceberg. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is a class act. (Allan Hunter) ■ General release, Wed 6 Oct.
DRAMA ENTER THE VOID (18) 142min ●●●●●
Argentine/French filmmaker Gaspar Noé’s latest is a metaphysical movie offered from the generally limited point of view of a drug-dealing teenager, Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), who is killed by the cops in Japan. Thereafter he hovers over his sister Linda’s life in Tokyo and the film claustrophobically holds to his perspective on events as it also flashes back into the sibling’s past. The film reworks and tries to find visual form to address spiritual questions of karma and reincarnation. But it is so diffuse in its ideas, so devoid of characterisation and so willing to play with an audience no matter how brilliant the shock tactics (the brother’s death and a car crash are cinematically astonishing) that a feeling of futility takes over. The film’s many problems are partly those of style. Noé’s curious ability to show
too much (one shot shows us the inside of a vagina with a penis moving in and out) yet so very little where we’re seeing everything from a ghostly perspective, is at best frustrating and at worst tedious.
Noé’s 1998 debut feature I Stand Alone remains this adolescent-minded
filmmaker’s best film, simply because in that film, whether by fluke or intuition, the balance between personal perspective and cinematic space was just right. What followed were film school-style exercises, fatuous in content and overly restless in form. (Tony McKibbin) ■ Filmhouse, Edinburgh, Fri 24 Sep–Thu 7 Oct. GFT, Glasgow, Tue 5–Thu 7 Oct.