Solaris (98 mins, 12A)
Directed by Steven Soderbergh; starring George Clooney, Natascha McElhone, Jeremy Davies, Viola Davis
Frida (123 mins, 15)
Directed by Julie Taymor; starring Salma Hayek, Alfred Molina, Roger Rees
Analyze That (95 mins, 15)
Directed by Harold Ramis; starring Robert De Niro, Billy Crystal, Lisa Kudrow
Jackass: The Movie (85 mins, 18)
Directed by Jeff Tremaine; starring Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, Chris Pontius, Steve-O
Life and Debt (96 mins, PG)
Directed by Stephanie Black
Steven Soderbergh has directed and produced more remakes than most of us have had power breakfasts. His latest, Solaris, is his most ambitious, if not necessarily his most entertaining. It's another version of Stanislaw Lem's novel, originally published in Polish in 1961 and filmed at great length in the USSR 10 years later by Andrei Tarkovsky as a sort of riposte to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
George Clooney, whose best movie roles to date have been in Soderbergh's Out of Sight and Ocean's Eleven, is convincingly angst-ridden as Chris Kelvin, a widowed psychologist in a near-future summoned to investigate the mysterious happenings aboard 'Prometheus', a space station orbiting the planet Solaris. Arriving there he discovers just two survivors, the weird, strung-out Snow (Jeremy Davies), who seems to be impersonating Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now, and the commanding, controlled Gordon (Viola Davis), one incoherent, the other tight-lipped. The unsettled Kelvin is visited, in what at first seems to be a dream, by his late wife, the ethereally beautiful Rheya (Natascha McElhone), who committed suicide seven years earlier. It transpires, however, that Solaris is some sort of oceanic intelligence with a will of its own that creates seemingly flesh-and-blood people from the memories and desires of the occupants of the space station. Inasmuch as they are not only parasitic, but also pathetically aware of their incompleteness, these 'guests' are dangerous to the dreamers and a threat to rational life on Earth.
Although Kelvin is surrounded by shiny, flashing hardware, this is philosophical science fiction concerned with questions of time, identity, memory and the relationship between mind and body. It is also a love story of a romantic, necrophilickind. This space variation on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice raises many issues, including how we'd behave given the opportunity to relive or extend our lives. The dialogue varies between the scientific-unintelligible and the oriental-gnomic. Soderbergh (who wrote, edited and photographed the movie as well as directing it) creates a portentously mystifying atmosphere by the merging of past and present, the subdued lighting, and - a device he's used before - playing dialogue on the soundtrack while the speakers' mouths remain firmly shut. The poetry in Tarkovsky's film resides in painterly images. The poetry here is quite literal in the sense that Dylan Thomas's 'And death shall have no dominion' is employed as a motif, first quoted by Kelvin as his favourite poem and later torn from Thomas's collected poems and clutched by Rheya on her death bed.
Julie Taymor was responsible for the stage version of The Lion King and the ambitious film of Titus Andronicus starring Anthony Hopkins. Her new movie Frida is a cross between a conventional Hollywood biopic and a Ken Russell extravaganza, with a spirited central performance from Salma Hayek as the half-Mexican, half-German-Jewish painter Frida Kahlo (1910-1954). It's a colourful life, and a brave and painful one, with much physical suffering as well as the spiritual torture of having to put up with the wild behaviour and endless infidelities of her husband, Mexico's most famous artist, the left-wing muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina).
In some ways it resembles the story of John Reed and Louise Bryant as told in Warren Beatty's Reds, a tale of lovers who are also soulmates and comrades in the Communist cause. In others it recalls Tim Robbins's Cradle Will Rock. All three feature numerous walk-on appearances by people with famous names. They also exhibit a touchingly naive feeling for the romance of Communism and a nostalgia for the hopeful times when radicals had more sex and better parties than anyone else. The pace is brisk, if somewhat unvaried, but the dialogue is too often inadequate or downright banal, and the reflections on art are shallow. Probably the most remarkable sequence is a visit that the Trotskys and the Riveras make to the Aztec pyramids, though the handling of the brief affair between Frida and Trotsky verges on the embarrassing. The most striking moments of the film are those nearest to the school of Ken Russell. A spectacular crash between a bus and a tram is followed by a representation of Frida's coma in the manner of a Day of the Dead fiesta. The lionisation of Rivera in New York is shown as a pastiche of another controversial Manhattan visitor of the time, King Kong. The photography, sharp-edged and crystal-clear, is by Rodrigo Prieto who shot Amores Perros and 8 Mile.
The amusing Analyze This starred Robert De Niro as Paul Vitti, the crude, violent but big-hearted Italian-American gang boss who becomes the patient of the gentle, neurotic Jewish shrink, Ben Sobol (Billy Crystal). It was sub-Sopranos stuff, and Analyze That is a feeble sequel that has Vitti released on parole under the charge of Sobol as part of an FBI scheme to put rival mobs at each others' throats. Lisa Kudrow is largely wasted as Sobol's wife, though no doubt she'll still be around for the next sequel which will likely be called 'Analyze the Other'.
Jackass: The Movie is a feature-length version of an American TV show in which a team of raucous young men perform violent stunts and play practical jokes of a frequently painful kind on each other and members of the public. One guy crosses an alligator pit by rope with bait hanging from his jockstrap; another puts a toy car into a condom, shoves it up his rectum and then goes for an X-ray to see what the doctor says. It's a cross between Animal House and Candid Camera. But unlike Candid Camera (whose creator, Allen Funt, was described by David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd as the second most ingenious sociologist in America), the Jackass boys show little interest in observing anyone else but themselves. Surprisingly, the film is co-produced by Spike Jonze, and, less surprisingly, has proved infinitely more popular at the American box office than Jonze's Adaptation.
Stephanie Black's Life and Debt is a didactic American documentary that sets out to show how economic neo-colonialism has been visited on Jamaica as a result of globalisation, the contradictory activities of the IMF and American insistence on free trade. Running through the film are interviews with farmers, labourers, the Jamaican economist Michael Witter, and former Prime Minister Michael Manley.
It is an instructive story of exploitation, and the biggest revelation to me was of the 'free zones' created by the United States where underpaid, unorganised Jamaican workers assemble clothing from materials manufactured elsewhere that enter and leave the island without the payment of any local taxes. But Black intersperses this directly political footage with endless shots of North American tourists enjoying themselves, oblivious to the natives and their culture. Over this she lays an indignant commentary drawn from a book called A Small Place, originally written about her native Antigua by the New Yorker writer Jamaica Kincaid, and adapted to fit Jamaica. This gives the movie a rather smug, contrived air.
