Film REVIEWS

DOCUMENTARY ROOM 237 (15) 102min ●●●●●

ROMANCE KEEP THE LIGHTS ON (18) 101 min ●●●●● COMEDY FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL... (18) 85min ●●●●●

This engrossing documentary presents a series of (supposedly) hidden meanings to be found embedded in Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic The Shining. The various readings of the film, which range from quite plausible to utterly balmy, are provided by five obsessive fans: a professor, a playwright, an author, a musician and a war reporter. Each are interviewed by director Rodney Ascher, who keeps his subjects off-screen, presents their cases with an admirable lack of judgment and illustrates the readings with clips from the film in question.

It’s a terrifically imaginative examination of Kubrick’s masterpiece, and an interesting comment on the nature of film appreciation in general. Bearing in mind what an eccentric obsessive its maker was, Ascher’s is an inspired treatment of The Shining. However wacky the arguments, they are never less than compelling. More worryingly, as the film progresses, they begin to make more and more sense. This leads one to suspect that, just as the five interviewees have been sucked into the world of the Overlook Hotel, so, too, will any film fan who follows The Shining closely enough. (Miles Fielder) Selected release from Fri 26 Oct.

Keep The Lights On is personal in a way that harks backs to American independent cinema of an earlier era. Director Ira Sachs has transformed moments from his own life into a thoughtful, tender film that brings to mind the melodramas of Douglas Sirk and the tortured tales of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The mild hilarity of two good-hearted girls struggling to make a living in the grimy world of phone-sex provides the unpromisingly twee premise of Jamie Travis’s forgettable For A Good Time, Call . . ., a comedy presumably funded as a goodwill vehicle for Seth Rogen’s new wife Lauren Miller, who co-wrote the script with Katie Anne Naylon.

Love is a blessing and a curse in this melancholy Travis’ debut feature teams Miller with Fringe’s

remembrance of a romance that unfolds in New York through the late 1990s and into the new century. Thure Lindhardt plays Erik, a Danish filmmaker whose life changes when he meets closeted lawyer Paul (Zachary Booth). Their passionate relationship is marked by joy and happiness, heartbreak and humiliation. It is also increasingly defined by Paul’s drug addiction.

It is a film about the failings and flaws that both men are trying to overcome although Erik’s struggle towards emotional maturity is more compelling than the ebb and flow of this defining relationship. Lindhardt provides the emotional core of the film and is very persuasive as a man aching for romance even as he resists commitment. (Allan Hunter) Selected release from Fri 2 Nov.

personable Ari Gaynor; they play Lauren and Katie, two economically challenged twentysomethings who initiate an unlikely business venture, marketing their skills as purveyors of telephone sex. With lovelorn but over-keen clients including Kevin Smith as a taxi driver and Rogen as an airline pilot, the girls are soon taking their telephone manner to the bank, but the pressures of their dirty enterprise soon begin to take their toll. The cameos are arguably the strongest element of Travis’s dog-eared comedy, which seems somewhat quaintly positioned in an era of live webcams and online pornography. For a really good time, you’d be better off just

watching Bridesmaids again. (Eddie Harrison) General release from Fri 2 Nov.

DRAMA BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD (12A) 93min ●●●●●

Benh Zeitlin’s extraordinary debut offers a heady mix of social realism and magic realism as it charts survival at the extreme margins of society. Based on a play called Juicy And Delicious, it unfolds in the Louisiana backwater of The Bathtub where six year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis) and her ailing father Wink (Dwight Henry) cling to a precarious existence in a makeshift wooden shack high above the ground. The father and daughter seem largely untouched by modernity or the wider world and when a storm hits there is the ferocity of Victor Seastrom’s silent classic The Wind (1928) in its depiction of lives at the mercy of the elements. Beasts is impressionistic and highly idiosyncratic; a

visionary jumble of images and emotions with dialogue that is often hard to grasp. There are echoes of Terrence Malick in its view of rural America and a clear affinity with Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are as we enter Hushpuppy’s vision of a world and its terrors. There are flashbacks to moments with her missing mother and scenes with rampaging creatures, prehistoric giant warthogs, who roam the land.

Initial impressions of the relationship between father and daughter suggest a brutal, callous parent but eventually we come to recognise that Wink cares deeply for the girl and is merely trying to strengthen her ability to handle the uncertainties of what lies ahead. The staunch avoidance of sentimentality makes the father/daughter dynamic all the more tender.

Henry and Wallis are both non-professional actors but

inhabit their roles with astonishing ease and conviction. Wallis especially invests the wide-eyed Hushpuppy with a defiance and stoicism that melts the heart. Beasts Of The Southern Wild is bracingly original and utterly beguiling. (Allan Hunter) Selected release from Fri 19 Oct.

70 THE LIST 18 Oct–15 Nov 2012