Novocaine **
ir: David Atkins
With: Steve Martin, Helena Bonham Carter, Laura Dern, Elias Koteas, Scott Caan, Keith David, Lynne Thigpen
95 mins, cert 15
www.novocaineonline.com
Who could forget Steve Martin's turn as the wacky sadistic dentist in Little Shop of Horrors? Martin himself clearly considers he has no option but to try, which may account for his strangely subdued performance as a respectable middle-aged dentist in this black-comedy thriller, getting criminally involved with sexy patient Helena Bonham Carter.
First-time director David Atkins inserts a droll dental X-ray motif for his opening credits, repeating them throughout the film. He enthusiastically cranks up the visual rhetoric of suspense, particularly night-time driving scenes with the person at the wheel flinching at oncoming headlights, but it's often difficult to tell if the Hitchcockian noir conventions are being spoofed or if we're being asked to take them seriously.
It leads to a problem of tone, of where exactly on the spectrum between comedy and thriller it is placing itself. It's certainly got some laughs, however, many due to a superb (but oddly uncredited) cameo from Kevin Bacon as a conceited actor doing research for his latest cop movie; the police let him question Martin - and he does an unnervingly good job. Why is this brilliant performer not more of a star, especially as we now know that he can play comedy? Finally, the novocaine of the title plays a horrible role in some DIY tooth-removal: it's a more hi-tech analgesic than Laurence Olivier's clove oil in Marathon Man. But numb is what I mostly felt throughout.
Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron **
Dirs: Kelly Asbury, Lorna Cook
With: Matt Damon, James Cromwell, Daniel Studi, Chopper Bernet
83 mins, cert U
www.dreamworks.com/spirit
Stallion? Stallion? Excuse me, to qualify as a stallion don't you have to have a certain something, and a certain two subsidiary somethings? This trio of necessities has been coyly removed from each of the wild horses in the new animated family feature from Dreamworks - appropriately, considering what a disappointingly tame film it is.
Incessantly promoted as "from the producers of Shrek", it actually does not have the smallest smidgen of that movie's wit, characterisation and sophistication, pitched at a very much blander, undemanding level, with far less ambitious visuals than audiences young and old have now come to expect. And the dismal middleweight power-ballads served up by Bryan Adams could be described as balls-aching, were it not for the anatomical failing mentioned above.
Spirit is supposed to be a free and noble stallion in the Old West of the 19th century, captured by the US Army, but freed by another prisoner, a young Lakota brave - the film thus proposing a PC common cause, questionable in its implications, between animals and Native Americans. The whole thing is horribly close to Bambi, which doesn't cut it in 2002. The children of Britain, downcast by the World Cup, deserve something better for the holidays.
Chop Suey **
Dir: Bruce Weber
98 mins, no cert
Like Churchill's themeless pudding, this gregarious autobiographical feature from photographer and film-maker Bruce Weber (who made the Chet Baker biopic Let's Get Lost) is lacking in focus. It manages to say a little, but not nearly enough, about himself, about the aesthetics of photography, about the handsome young wrestler and homoerotic icon Peter Johnson, with whom Weber is currently preoccupied, and about all the other characters that Weber has photographed, including Robert Mitchum, Diana Freeland and Wilfred Thesiger.
The premise of the film is that Weber creates a vast, campy portfolio of Johnson dressed up in various guises, and then takes him on a tour of his own portfolio of star interviews and photos, without really illuminating anything or anyone. Johnson - a married man with a daughter - is not asked for his opinion on being a gay icon, and is treated as a brainless beefcake throughout, rightly or wrongly. Weber's sheer rapture at physical beauty is overwhelmingly sincere, but nothing of much depth is revealed about anyone, and the parade of erstwhile personalities comes across as so much necrophilia, especially when it comes to the subject of gay supper-club singer Frances Faye, a minor figure on the subject of whom Weber is a monumental bore.
The King Is Dancing *
Dir: Gérard Corbiau
With: Benoît Magimel, Boris Terral, Tchéky Karyo, Colette Emmanuelle, Cécile Bois, Claire Keim, Johan Leysen, Idwig Stephane, Emil Tarding
115 mins, cert 15
www.leroidanse.com
How has pre-revolutionary France recently inspired films that are such incredible ordure? Last year, Charles Shyer's The Affair of the Necklace, with its mincing 17th-century cardinals and comtesses, stank up the screen. Before that, Roland Joffe's Vatel, a Louis XIV period piece mercifully still unreleased in the UK, reeked to high heaven. And as for this film, about Louis XIV, Lully and Molière, frankly you could fork it on to your roses and win an award at the Chelsea Flower Show.
It is a grisly study of the Sun King's propensity for dancing at his courtly masques. Benoît Magimel - from Haneke's The Piano Teacher - is the roi ; Tcheky Karyo is Molière, and Boris Terral plays the court musician Lully, looking like a constipated Marc Bolan, seethingly resentful of Molière's growing importance, the occasion for much sub-Amadeus fussing about reputation, glory and eternity.
Bombastic, flatulent, with pseudo-erotic demi-orgy scenes, The King Is Dancing does have one unintentionally funny scene in which Lully and his players have to provide some sexy mood music outside a tent in which His Majesty is getting his royal end away - continually having to peer inside to see whether a crescendo is in order, pouting and glowering the while. Director Gérard Corbiau has won Oscar nominations for his previous music-themed pictures, but watching this one is like inhaling pomade.
A Night at the Opera / A Day at the Races *****
Dir: Sam Wood
With: Groucho Marx, Chico Marx, Harpo Marx, Allan Jones, Margaret Dumont
96 mins / 111 mins, no cert
"There ain't no sanity clause," says a truculent Chico to Groucho in the contract routine of A Night at the Opera: a gag which neatly describes the entire structure and grammar of the brothers' delirious comedy. This classic double-bill, shows Groucho first as a huckster-agent posing as a connoisseur of high society, and then as a horse doctor passing himself off as a distinguished consultant. The quick-fire routines are brilliant; the one-liners crack like gunshots and most enjoyable are wacky eccentricities like Groucho unaccountably replying: "Thangg-YAH!" whenever the woman he's inveigled into his hotel room says a demure: "Thank you." It is impossible to explain why that is so funny; their sheer irreverence, exuberance and verbal comic genius are marvellous: a heavenly double-bill.
