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Friday Review: ScreenReview: FILM RELEASES - Vodka Lemon

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  • Friday Review: ScreenReview: FILM RELEASES - Vodka Lemon

    Friday Review: ScreenReview: FILM RELEASES: Steve Rose on stunning tale of
    warring Chinese states, plus the rest of the week's films

    The Guardian - United Kingdom
    Sep 24, 2004

    STEVE ROSE


    Hero

    4/5

    Dir: Zhang Yimou

    With: Jet Li, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Maggie Cheung, Zhang Ziyi, Chen
    Daoming

    99 mins, cert 12A

    This Chinese epic may owe its existence to Crouching Tiger, Hidden
    Dragon (which was essentially an American-Chinese epic), but it
    betters that film on most counts. In contrast to Hollywood's recent,
    sprawling attempts at majestic action movies, everything seems to be
    in tune with everything else here, all governed by a rigid formal
    structure. Set during the "warring states" period before the entity of
    China had been created, the action is framed around a meeting between
    the Qin emperor (Chen Daoming) and an assassin named Nameless (Jet
    Li). We see in flashback how Nameless eliminated the emperor's most
    feared enemies, Broken Sword, Sky and Flying Snow. But the King doubts
    him, and offers a different explanation of events. And so they trade
    stories like a chess game, writing China's history in the process.

    Each segment is colour-coded, so the dominant colour is red in the
    first story, blue in the next and so on - a clever device that
    preserves simplicity and allows the art department to pull out all the
    stops. Hero really is one of the best-looking films ever made - a
    combination of stunning landscapes, graceful duels and rigorous
    compositions, all topped off with the cream of Chinese acting
    talent. If there's one flaw, it's that the formal stateliness stifles
    any sympathy we might have for these characters, who spend a fair
    amount of time dying tragically. More intriguing is the overt theme of
    Chinese unification, by no means a redundant topic. Where director
    Zhang was once banned from making films in China, now he's firmly at
    the centre of the establishment, and essentially delivers an argument
    in favour of tyranny. But there are sly hints of subversion. The
    heroism of the title is open to ambiguity, and at one point the film's
    recurring motif, the pro-unification phrase "all under heaven", is
    literally written in the sand.

    Red Lights

    4/5

    Dir: Cedric Kahn

    With: Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Carole Bouquet, Vincent Deniard,
    Charline Paul

    105 mins, cert 15

    After the excellent Roberto Succo, here's another smooth,
    sophisticated, real-world thriller from Cedric Kahn. Again the
    transgression of the criminal is a theme, but this time it's conflated
    with the rules of the road, which proves to be an extremely rich
    combination. And there's something rather brilliant about a movie in
    which the supposed hero gets increasingly plastered.

    We've lost track of how much Antoine (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) has had
    to drink before he and his wife (Carole Bouquet) have even left
    Paris. Their car is one of the millions heading south for the summer
    holidays, but Antoine doesn't want to be one of the herd. His decision
    to take a "short cut", followed by a few bar stops, prompts his wife
    to abandon him. Antoine then picks up a surly hitcher, whom he pretty
    much knows to be the escaped fugitive mentioned on the radio. Antoine
    sees his passenger as a soulmate, a fellow rebel. "You don't give a
    shit about their laws!" he proclaims. The fugitive, by contrast is
    keen for Antoine to do exactly that. The story runs out of gas a
    little when it leaves the road, but on the whole its marvellously
    gripping, with a good few surprises up its sleeve.

    Cellular

    3/5

    Dir: David R. Ellis

    With: Kim Basinger, Chris Evans, William H Macy, Eric Christian Olsen,
    Jessica Bie

    l94 mins, cert 15

    Most recent thrillers would have fallen apart completely had someone
    possessed a mobile phone. This is the solution: a high-concept,
    breakneck dash through the many features of the new Nokia 6600. The
    hero, whose real name is unfortunately Chris Evans, receives a random
    call from the hysterical Kim Basinger, who has been kidnapped. From
    then on, it's up to Evans and his Nokia to save the day. There are
    some genuinely funny moments, but the writers are eventually defeated
    by their hi-tech remit, and resort to an off-the-shelf shoot-out
    ending.

    Save the Green Planet!

    3/5

    Dir: Jeong Jun-hwan

    With: Shin Ha-kyun, Baek Yun-shik, Hwang Jeong-min, Lee Jae-yong

    118 mins, cert 18

    A bizarre Korean sci-fi movie that's so inventively demented, it's
    hard to dislike. It's the unpredictable story of a loner named Lee
    (Shin Ha-kyun), who attempts to save the earth by kidnapping a
    pharmaceuticals executive whom he believes to be an alien. So,
    naturally, he shaves off his prisoner's hair, applies antihistamine
    cream to his feet, then tortures him with electricity. Even David Icke
    would blanch at Lee's apocalyptic conspiracy theory, but we're
    successfully kept guessing about his sanity until the very
    end. Technically accomplished, manically acted and extremely violent,
    it's constantly on the verge of collapsing into complete nonsense, but
    never actually does.

    Vodka Lemon

    3/5

    Dir: Hiner Saleem

    With: Romen Avinian, Lala Sarkissian, Ivan Franek, Armen Marutyan

    84 mins, cert PG

    Another dry, droll, almost dialogue-free drama from an obscure corner
    of Europe, to file alongside the work of Georgia's Otar Iosseliani and
    Finland's Aki Kaurismaki. This is set in rural Armenia, which appears
    to be a desolate post-Soviet country where the only commodity is vodka
    and the national pastime is sitting outside on chairs, despite the
    freezing temperature. It's a bright, empty, snowbound landscape in
    which any man-made object looks surreal - a hospital bed, a piano,
    even the graveyard where two widowed survivors form a tentative,
    courteous romance. Nothing new, you might say, but this establishes
    its own distinctive rhythm, and puts its country on the map.

    She Hate Me

    2/5

    Dir: Spike Lee

    With: Anthony Mackie, Kerry Washington, Ellen Barkin, Monica Bellucci,
    Jim Brown

    138 mins, cert 15

    Spike Lee seems to have a backlog of issues he's steamed up about. So
    here he attempts tackle them all at once: the corruption of corporate
    America; the persecution of marginalised peoples; the tyranny of the
    heterosexual nuclear family; black homophobia; even the fate of the
    security guard who exposed the Watergate scandal. The result is one of
    the oddest films he's ever made. The hero (Mackie) is a sacked
    corporate whistleblower who finds a lucrative new line of work
    impregnating lesbians, including his ex-girlfriend, her girlfriend,
    and the daughter of a mafia crime boss. With a star-filled cast,
    animated interludes, and a hugely improbably storyline, there's rarely
    a dull moment, but you're constantly wondering what Lee is really
    trying to say. At least he's trying to say something.

    Switchblade Romance

    2/5

    Dir: Alexandre Aja

    With: Cecile De France, Maiwenn Le Besco, Philippe Nahon, Franck
    Khalfoun

    91 mins, cert 18

    This presents itself as an edgy new French horror movie, but it's
    essentially a derivative old-school horror movie - with a twist that
    only leaves you feeling even more cheated. It starts with urbanites
    Alex (Maiwenn le Besco) and Marie (Cecile de France) coming to stay at
    Marie's family in their isolated farmhouse. But after a bloody
    slaughter on the first night, courtesy of a random redneck, they're
    the only two left. What follows is less a game of suspense than a
    drawn-out game of hide-and-seek, with the requisite false alarms and
    idiotic decisions. Almost everybody needs killing at least twice
    before they stay dead, and there's some questionable gender
    stereotyping to boot. If nothing else, though, it's a warning against
    selling axes in service stations.

    Spivs

    1/5

    Dir: Colin Teague

    With: Ken Stott, Kate Ashfield, Nick Moran, Jack Dee94 mins, cert 15

    No! It's back! The Brit gangster comedy rears its empty, Brylcreemed
    head again. It's all here: smart suits, split screens, short cons and
    Nick Moran - until spiv-in-chief Ken Stott discovers a lorry load of
    illegal immigrants. Then it lurches clumsily into an issue drama, as
    he takes two eastern European urchins under his wing. The presence of
    comics like Jack Dee and Paul Kaye only reinforces the impression that
    these are two incompatible genres struggling to coexist. It's like
    Lock, Stock meets In This World.

    The Punisher

    1/5

    Dir: Jonathan Hensleigh

    With: Tom Jane, John Travolta, Will Patton, Laura Harring, Ben
    Foster124 mins, cert 18

    This lunk-headed action movie feels like something you'd have found on
    video-store shelves in the mid-1980s, and passed over in favour of
    something better, like Commando or Cobra. It's the same old formula: a
    gym-pumped brute of a hero (Tom Jane); a distastefully high body
    count; and lots of big explosions. For John Travolta, it looks like
    Pulp Fiction never happened.

    The Ister

    3/5

    Dirs: David Barison, Daniel Ross

    189 mins, no cert

    Few films this, or any other, year will be such an unashamedly
    intellectual long haul. Part travelogue up the Danube from mouth to
    source, part meditation on writings by Martin Heidegger, this
    three-hour documentary is not for the faint-hearted. The title is
    borrowed from a poem by 17th-century German Friedrich Holderlin (Ister
    being the Danube's classical Greek name), that in turn gave rise to a
    series of lectures Heidegger gave at the height of the second world
    war. Heidegger, of course, is forever tainted by his enthusiastic
    embrace of Nazism; here, with considerable rigour, a series of French
    philosophers attempt to grapple with his thought. Another
    controversial figure, film-maker Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, of Hitler: A
    Film from Germany fame, weighs in for a few minutes at the end.
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