The Devil's Backbone (106 mins, 15) Directed by Guillermo del Toro; starring Eduardo Noriega, Marisa Paredes, Federico Luppi, Fernando Tielve
Bandits (122 mins, 12) Directed by Barry Levinson; starring Cate Blanchett, Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (104 mins, 18) Directed by Kevin Smith; starring Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith, Ben Affleck
Zoolander (89 mins, 12) Directed by Ben Stiller; starring Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Christine Taylor
John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars (98 mins, 15) Directed by John Carpenter; starring Ice Cube, Natasha Henstridge, Pam Grier, Clea Duvall
For 30 years now, Spain has been making movies in which the Spanish Civil War is observed from its fringe through the puzzled eyes of sensitive children. The finest of them is Victor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive, shot two years before Franco's death, and The Devil's Backbone, written and directed by the Mexican Guillermo del Toro and produced by Pedro Almodóvar, is a worthy addition. Like del Toro's earlier pictures, Cronos and Mimic, it's a ghost story not entirely unlike the recent Spanish success The Others.
The film takes place at an isolated orphanage on a hot, dry plain in 1938 when the Fascists are clearly in the ascendancy. The orphanage is run by a kindly couple, the crippled Carmen (Almodóvar's marvellous leading lady Marisa Paredes) and the elderly Dr Casares (Federico Luppi). They're covert loyalist supporters, and their latest charge is Carlos (Fernando Tielve), whose father was recently killed in battle.
From the start there's an uneasy, eerie atmosphere. Carlos is bullied by his fellow orphans; he tries to make sense of overheard conversations; a giant unexploded bomb in the courtyard is mysteriously connected with the disappearance of one of the boys and the rumours of a threatening spirit, 'the one who sighs'.
Carlos keeps catching glimpses of a ghostly figure that issues warnings of forthcoming catastrophe, and after a group of International Brigade prisoners are brought to the house and summarily executed, it becomes clear that Carmen and Dr Casares must flee for their lives. At this point a quiet, suggestive picture suddenly turns into shockingly violent melodrama with the vindictive ex-inmate Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega) as the catalyst. There are even echoes of Lord of the Flies in the brutal climax. It's a striking film and further good news for the Spanish cinema, too few of whose films open here.
I had hoped that Barry Levinson's Bandits was a film version of the admirable 1987 Elmore Leonard novel of the same name, about an ex-con running a New Orleans funeral parlour and getting mixed up with right-wing fat cats supplying arms to the Contras in Nicaragua. No such luck. It's an unoriginal, flat-footed comedy-thriller starring Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton as an odd couple who meet in the Oregon State Pen and escape to become famous on the West Coast as 'the sleepover bandits' for their practice of spending the night with the families of the managers whose banks they are about to rob.
The pair are intended to be charming and loveable, but they're the most unendearing American twosome since Senator McCarthy's sidekicks, David Schine and Roy Cohn, hit the road in the early Fifties. Fine actress as she is, Cate Blanchett, playing a discontented housewife who joins them in their life of crime, fails to provide a plausible explanation of what attracted her to them.
Kevin Smith's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and Ben Stiller's Zoolander are self-indulgent movies scripted and written by their stars. Each is a cross between a crude dumbed-down comedy and a home movie featuring a couple of dozen guest appearances by various performers and celebrities, a number of them unknown to me.
Smith's film centres on Jay and Silent Bob, two dim-witted drug-dealing loafers who appeared in minor roles in his previous films. Here they discover that an underground comic strip based on their lives is being filmed in Hollywood and they hitchhike west to collect some loot. Jay, the bright one, believes that hitchers are expected to reward their hosts with oral sex and tries this on a nun played by Carrie Fisher. Not very funny. The crude performances with knowing glances at the audience give a new meaning to the term 'mug shot'.
In Zoolander, Ben Stiller plays the world's leading male model, who is brainwashed by New York rag-trade tycoons into attempting the assassination of the Malaysian prime minister to prevent him abolishing child labour and introducing a minimum wage. The guests here range from David Bowie, who umpires a catwalk contest between Stiller and his chief rival, to David Duchovny, who in the movie's one amusing scene proposes the theory that all major American assassinations from Lincoln to Kennedy were organised by the garment industry. Like Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Zoolander is not so much in bad taste as simply tasteless.
In the Seventies and early Eighties we eagerly looked forward to John Carpenter's next lively low-budget action flick. But he hasn't made anything of consequence for nearly 20 years and John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars is a sad SF-remake of his minor classic Assault on Precinct 13, which itself re-worked Hawks's Rio Bravo. The police station here is on Mars and the assailants are hordes of flesh-hungry Martians straight out of a George Romero zombie picture. The body count is astronomical, as we say on the Red Planet, but necessarily so. 'This is about one thing - dominion', says the leading cop (Natasha Henstridge), by which she means keeping the Red Planet in the grip of the business cartel running its mines.
