Lucky Break
(108 mins, 12)
Directed by Peter Cattaneo; starring James Nesbitt, Olivia Williams, Timothy Spall, Christopher Plummer
Le Secret
(107 mins, 18)
Directed by Virginie Wagon; starring Anne Coesens, Michel Bompoil, Tony Todd
At the Height of Summer
(112 mins, PG)
Directed by Tran Anh Hung; starring Tran Nu Y n-Kh, Nguyen Nhu Quynh, Le Khanh
Heartbreakers
(124 mins, 15)
Directed by David Mirkin; starring Sigourney Weaver, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Ray Liotta, Gene Hackman
Josie and the Pussycats
(100 mins, PG)
Directed by Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan; starring Rachael Leigh Cook, Alan Cumming, Parker Posey
Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles
(95 mins, PG)
Directed by Simon Wincer; starring Paul Hogan, Linda Kozlowski
The first film that Peter Cattaneo has directed for the cinema since his successful debut with The Full Monty four years ago. An original screenplay by the Irish novelist, scriptwriter and journalist Ronan Bennett, who has been on the receiving end of our criminal justice system. An attractive, largely British cast. These factors combined make the prison comedy Lucky Break a film to look forward to. The result is something of a disappointment, though enjoyable and entertaining in a rich British tradition that stretches from Will Hay's Convict 99 in the Thirties to television's Porridge.
The three-times Ulster loser Jimmy Hands (James Nesbitt) and his lifelong chum Rudy (Lennie James) get banged up for armed bank robbery in the maximum security prison Long Rudford. Their fellow inmates and the staff are familiar types going back to the seminal jail movie The Big House in 1930, and because this is a comedy not a drama, the actors are encouraged to caricature their roles rather than give them individual identities. There's the out-of-touch, upper-class governor (Christopher Plummer) with his passion for musicals; the dim, kindly warder and the sharp, vindictive warder; the gentle giant and the evil bully; the polite, educated convict; the young tearaway with special gifts; the tortured family man marked out for torment and suicide; and so on. A newish but still fairly familiar figure is the woman shrink (Olivia Williams), to whom the hero develops an amorous attachment.
The naive and canny Jimmy takes an interest in drama so he and his fellows can use as a cover for their escape the production of a terrible musical about Nelson and Emma Hamilton that the governor has written. This, too, is not exactly new, and no doubt Plummer recalled how the von Trapp family used a similar device to outwit the Gestapo. The production of the Nelson musical (actually written by Stephen Fry) has the predictable jokes about the convict playing Hardy flinching from kissing Nelson. One would have thought Bennett capable of something more ambitious, something like John Hancock's Weeds, which starred Nick Nolte as a long-term convict whose life is transformed through the discovery of the theatre.
Le Secret is the directorial debut of Virginie Wagon, the co-author of Erik Zonka's first-rate The Dreamlife of Angels. Unlike that richly textured movie about two difficult, unemployed young Frenchwomen, Le Secret is a commonplace treatment of the current French cinematic preoccupation with middle-class married women searching for sexual fulfilment in the arms of a strong, silent lover. The conventionally pretty Marie (Anne Coesens), a successful 35-year-old encyclopedia saleswoman with a four-year-old son, resists promotion in a job that bores her and is discontented with her adoring husband. An accidental meeting with a handsome black American choreographer (Tony Todd from the Candyman horror films), who's in Paris housesitting for a friend, leads to a love affair that gains from her limited English and his ignorance of French. This discreet picture deliberately lacks the dash and drama of Last Tango in Paris and concludes inconsequentially with a sort of reconciliation between Marie and her drunken husband in a swimming pool at a friend's wedding reception.
Another disappointment is At the Height of Summer, the new film by the French-educated and Paris-based Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung. His previous films, the subtle Scent of Green Papaya, which was set over several decades in a Saigon household but filmed in a French studio, and Cyclo, shot on location in a turbulent Ho Chi Minh City, touched ambivalently on the political and social background of the characters. The new film, which concerns three sisters, one of them a moderately well-off restaurateur, and their brother, a struggling actor, takes place in Hanoi and lacks a vivid social context.
One of the sisters is married to a depressed photographer who prefers making studies of plants to people because they're more tranquil; both are having secret affairs and he has a son with his peasant lover. The other married sister, who's pregnant, suspects her husband, an egotistical, blocked novelist, of having an affair, though in fact he's narrowly avoided adultery. The younger unmarried sister has incestuous desires for her brother and is in the process of breaking up with an architecture student. The film is elegantly composed, but the narrative is muddled and the characters are, at best, only moderately interesting. We learn little about the culture other than that, until recently, it was all right for a woman to touch a man's penis but not his face, the latter being regarded as something noble.
Finally, two American movies and an Australian picture largely shot in the States, none of them of much interest. The brightest is Heartbreakers, starring Sigourney Weaver as a man-hating confidence trickster who has trained her daughter (Jennifer Love Hewitt) to become her partner in crime. Their modus operandi is selecting a well-off male victim, getting him to marry Weaver, and then having him caught in flagrante with the daughter, leading to a big divorce settlement. After having ripped off big-time car thief Ray Liotta, the pair head for Miami and a final scam, their chosen mark being an elderly tobacco billionaire (Gene Hackman), an outrageously cynical capitalist who's dying from overindulgence in his own product.
Heartbreakers aspires to the company of The Sting and The Grifters but lacks their ingenuity, wit and humanity. It moves in fits and starts without developing comic momentum, but there are a few good jokes. Among the latter I would not number the laboured gag of someone accidentally breaking the penis off the statue of a male nude. This is the third time this tired art gallery joke has been used in movies over the past couple of months.
The only startling aspect of the teen comedy Josie and the Pussycats is that it has taken the combined resources of Universal Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Twentieth Century-Fox to bring it to our screens. A smooth rock band manager (Alan Cumming) and a ruthless record company head (Parker Posey) are conspiring with the US government to brainwash teenage consumers by putting subliminal messages on rock records to instruct young listeners on what they should wear, eat and buy, and whom they should vote for. The latest dim group they exploit, after turning them into overnight sensations, is the girl group Josie and the Pussycats, from suburban Los Angeles. This witless assault on manipulation and consumerism has more placement advertising than anything I've seen since that ludicrous advertisement magazine, Jim's Inn, was banned from the ITV network in the mid-1960s.
A similar piece of (presumably) unintentional irony is at the centre of Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles. In the second sequel to the crude 1987 comedy Crocodile Dundee, Paul Hogan as the eponymous, naive backwoodsman from the Northern Territory accompanies his rich American wife and young son to Los Angeles, where her newspaper tycoon father has put her in temporary charge of a local tabloid. With Dundee's help she investigates a Hollywood scam in which a gang of renegade Yugoslavs use a series of disastrous movies to launder money and smuggle Balkan art treasures, their latest production being a second sequel called Lethal Agent III .
The film is like Beverly Hills Cop without the jokes and the pizzazz, and the timing isn't even as good as the clock on the Old Vicarage at Grantchester (which at least gets things right twice every 24 hours). George Hamilton and Mike Tyson make ineffectual guest appearances. As for the self-admiring Paul Hogan, I'm reminded of the comment on Hopper, the chauvinistic Australian millionaire in Lady Windermere's Fan: 'Hopper is one of Nature's gentlemen, the worst type of gentleman I know.'
