King's Game
(103 mins, 12A)
Directed by Nikolaj Arcel; starring Anders W Berthelsen, Soren Pilmark, Nastja Arcel, Lars Mikkelsen
4
(126 mins, nc)
Directed by Ilya Khrzhanovsky; starring Mariia Vovchenko, Sergei Shnurov, Yuri Laguta
George A Romero's Land of the Dead
(93 mins, 15)
Directed by George A Romero; starring Dennis Hopper, Simon Baker, Asia Argento, John Leguizamo
When Will I Be Loved
(81 mins, 15)
Directed by James Toback; with Neve Campbell, Frederick Weller, Dominic Chianese
Howl's Moving Castle
(119 mins, U)
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki; featuring the voices of Jean Simmons, Christian Bale, Lauren Bacall, Billy Crystal
Ab-normal Beauty
(101 mins, 18)
Directed by Oxide Pang; starring Race Wong, Rosanne Wong, Anson Leung
One Nite in Mongkok
(109 mins, 15)
Directed by Derek Yee; starring Daniel Wu, Cecilia Cheung, Alex Fong
At the moment, Denmark is producing the most thoughtful and interesting films not only in Scandinavia but in western Europe, and Nikolaj Arcel's gripping political thriller, King's Game, is fairly typical. The movie turns on the events following a car crash in which the head of the country's Centre party is seriously injured a few days before an election he's expected to win. The accident happens when the politician's chauffeur takes his eye off the road to light his boss's cigarette, an illicit, hypocritical act as the politician had given up smoking as a vote-getting device and to become a positive role model to youth.
With the leader in hospital, the party's press officer starts briefing against the obvious successor, a woman of liberal convictions and implicitly in favour of a conniving, right-wing contender. The chosen conduit is an inexperienced reporter at a leading broadsheet who happens to be the son of a former justice minister and is promoted by an editor anxious to keep in with a future Prime Minister.
The plot thickens as charges of corruption are levelled at the female politician's husband and the medical condition of the brain-dead leader is kept from the press. This is an exciting story and what makes it especially convincing is that it is all very low key. The lies and dirty tricks are so commonplace that few of those involved think anything is truly wrong.
The ironic pay-off is the announcement that the principal and temporarily disgraced conspirator was shortly there-after appointed Denmark's commissioner to the EU. I don't think anyone in this country is likely to leave the cinema saying that it couldn't happen here.
Another highly individual directorial debut is Ilya Khrzhanovsky's 4, a surreal account of life in presentday Russia where vodka flows like the Volga. It recalls the work of Swede Roy Anderson (especially his Songs from the Second Floor) and Peter Greenaway (particularly the numerically obsessed Drowning by Numbers).
In the movie everything comes in fours, starting with a night scene in Moscow where four large dogs sitting in front of a shop window containing four large dolls are disturbed by four giant pounding drills tearing up the street. Dogs, dolls and loud machines recur throughout. Then four people gather in the early hours in a bar: a tired bartender, an attractive young prostitute, a piano tuner and the manager of a meat-processing plant.
They chat for half an hour, the piano tuner claiming to be a scientist engaged in genetic engineering, the prostitute representing herself as an advertising agent for revolutionary office machinery, and the meat man speaking at length of his government job supplying mineral water to the Kremlin. This position enables him to expatiate on the drinking habits of the President and first lady.
From then, on everything proceeds in quartets as the hooker, the tuner and the meat man go their various sorry ways to the Gulag, to an early grave, to a miserable life. I found it funny and weirdly engrossing, but I predict it will prove divisive. Some will think it a tour de force, others a mere tour of fours.
With George A Romero's Land of the Dead, Romero has joined that elite group (it includes Sidney Sheldon, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker and Charles Dickens) who've had their names incorporated into the titles of movies. But he's still doing exactly what he's been up to since his 1968 debut with the shoestring horror flick Night of the Living Dead.
Once again, flesh-eating zombies have risen from their graves to destroy America and are being kept at bay by a small band of desperate survivors. But what began as a dark satire on consumerism has now become some kind of post 9/11 allegory on the manipulation of the public by a cabal of ruthless capitalists led by Dennis Hopper, who smokes large cigars, quaffs champagne and chews the carpet.
The violence is now even bloodier and more extreme: heads fly off like coconuts in a fairground, body parts are chewed as if they were fragments of take-away fried chicken.
The central presence of Neve Campbell, star of Wes Craven's Scream trilogy, suggests that When Will I Be Loved is a horror flick. No such luck. It's a pretentious piece of pseudo-intellectual erotica in which a rich, wilful, selectively promiscuous New Yorker exacts a terrible revenge on her wheeler-dealer boyfriend, who offers her to a billionaire Italian media mogul for $1 million. Much of the time is devoted to people walking and talking in Manhattan, and the movie resembles Indecent Proposal remade by a naive young follower of Woody Allen.
Finally, three minor Asian films, one deeply disappointing, one slickly stylish, one pretty enjoyable. The disappointing one is Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle. It's an overlong animated version of a children's book by British author Diana Wynne Jones about a little girl getting involved with witches and wizards in a militarist central European country around 1910. With leading Hollywood stars providing the voices, there is little of the magic and Japanese flavour of such Miyazaki masterpieces as Spirited Away. However, the first half-hour is rather good.
Directed by Oxide Pang and co-produced by his twin brother, Danny, Ab-normal Beauty is a psychological horror film set in Bangkok in which a beautiful young art student becomes obsessed with death in her painting and photograph. It's a minor addition to that body of movies about disturbed and threatened photographers that includes Peeping Tom, Blow-Up and The Eyes of Laura Mars.
One Nite in Mongkok is an exciting thriller set on Christmas Eve in the most violent, densely populated district of Hong Kong. A low-priced contract killer from the mainland is hired to settle a gang war. It's his first visit to the big city. But the police get on to him immediately and he's pursued in company with a young prostitute who has also come from an impoverished Chinese village to seek her fortune. The cops and their quarry are presented with considerable sympathy, the narrative drive is fierce and the sense of place is palpable.
