Teacher, leave that crack alone

May 31 2007 Birmingham Post

Mike Davies reviews this week's new releases

HALF NELSON, CERT 15, 107 MINS

If you can imagine Sidney Poitier with a crack habit and Lulu as an emotionally needy youngster looking for a father figure then switch the races around, you've got director Ryan Fleck's low key update of To Sir, With Love.

Ryan Gosling deservedly earned an Oscar nomination for his understated performance as Dan Dunne, a white middle-school history teacher whose approach to the official curriculum has earned him the respect of his class of black Brooklyn kids.

After school, however, Dunne leads a different life, cruising bars and smoking crack. No wonder he's a little bleary-eyed in class.

He also coaches the girl's basketball team and it's after one game that he's found wasted in the changing rooms by Drey (Shareeka Epps), one of his 13-year-old pupils. The old beyond her years product of a broken home, living with her overworked mother, father permanently absent and brother doing time, she takes it in her stride.

And so develops an unlikely friendship, part mentor-student, part surrogate parent and, for Drey, part classroom crush.

Things are complicated however by the presence of Frank (Anthony Mackie), the local dealer for whom Drey's brother took the rap.

Though apparently genuinely concerned about the girl, he's clearly not the right sort of influence; he's also Dunne's drug supplier.

It would have been easy to fall into melodramatic cliche and inspirational sentimentality, but thanks to sharp, sympathetic direction and terrific unshowy work by both Gosling and Epps it eschews predictable confrontations, simplistic moralising and pat conclusions.

Fleck and co-writer Anna Boden subtly sketch in back stories, revealing how Dunne's own emotional problems with his repressed, disillusioned parents and reformed addict ex girlfriend have contributed to his slide into self-destruction without resorting to crass flashbacks or heavy-handed exposition.

Likewise, the archival footage from the Civil Rights struggle that form part of Dunne's lessons afford the film a bigger picture without overplaying the message.

Thoughtfully but non-judgmentally addressing the complex moral dilemmas that confront the various characters, it refuses to paint the world in black and white, slowly feeling its way through the grey to a moving denouement that, with muted redemption and tentative second chances, illustrates the connections that bind us and offers a quietly hopeful portrait of humanity.

FLYBOYS, CERT 12A, 138 MINS

In 1916, a year before the USA entered the war, many young Americans went to France to volunteer as fighter pilots, joining what would be known as the Lafayette Escadrille at Verdun, flying rickety bi-planes in combat against the superior German forces.

In total some 38 Americans flew for the squadron, among them James Norman Hall and Charles Nordhoff who would go on to write Mutiny on the Bounty.

Their story is wheeled out here by director Tony Bill, following an overlong and predictable Top Gun arc from training to big showdown and personal vendetta.

Himself a pilot, Bill's patently more interested in staging the aerial dog fights, including a stunning assault on a zeppelin, using a mix of stunt flying and CGI to take you right inside the cockpits where, without parachutes, the only option pilots had if they were hit was to crash, burn in the plane or shoot themselves.

There's some thrilling sequences in the sky, rather fewer on the ground where, save for James Franco's cocky Texan maverick Blaine Rawlings, there's little by way of character exploration beyond stock stereotypes to provide any substantial emotional involvement.

Martin Henderson does a perfunctory line in enigmatic loner as the veteran squadron leader who (rooted in fact but never explained) has a pet lion, Jean Reno phones it in as Captain Thenaut (the only real life figure in evidence) and newcomer Jennifer Decker makes hard work of the padded out sub-plot's French farm girl romantic interest.

It went down in flames at the American box office, but its old fashioned heroics and meticulous attention to detail are worth a spin.

AWAY FROM HER, CERT 12A, 109 MINS

Hitherto best known for her understated work in such film as The Sweet Hereafter, Last Night, My Life Without Me and, er, Dawn Of The Dead, Canadian actress Sarah Polley steps behind the camera for her feature debut as writer-director, a low key but assured adaptation of Alice Munro's Alzheimer's story The Bear Came Over the Mountain.

Fiona (Julie Christie) and Grant Anderson (Gordon Pinset) are a long married couple, happy despite oblique references to his past philandering.

However, their contented retirement is threatened when her memory loss is diagnosed with the onset of Alzheimer's. Despite his protests, she insists on booking in to a care home.

Not allowed to visit for a month, the longest they've ever been separated, Grant's fears are confirmed when he arrives to find she longer knows who he is. Worse, she has struck up a relationship with Aubrey (Michael Murphy), a near mute fellow patient.

Even so, Grant's selfless devotion (and perhaps guilt) is such that, when Fiona begins to deteriorate after Aubrey's returned home, he visits his wife, Marian (Olympia Dukakis) to ask if she'd consider readmitting him. And in their mutual pain, so another relationship begins.

The depiction of Alzheimer's is a little sanitised in an On Golden Pond sort of approach to senility, but that doesn't detract from the film's poignant emotional resonance nor the consummate performances from Christie and Pinsent.

WEDDING DAZE, CERT 15, 90 MINS

Originally titled The Pleasure of Your Company and languishing on the shelf since its US previews last year, this romcom's rather better than its American Pie/Meet The Parents hybrid might suggest.

A year after quite literally scaring his fiancée to death by proposing dressed as Cupid, Jason Biggs is being goaded by his best friend to start dating again.

So, he proposes to the first woman he speaks to, waitress Isla Fisher. And (after a lengthy flashback detailing her motivations) she surprisingly accepts.

Before the day's out, she's moved in to his apartment and they're learning more about each other, and maybe even actually falling in love.

There are though, a few hurdles to surmount. Like, his oversexed parents, her controlling mother, a wimp Jewish stepdad who invents toys (the Jewnicorn cuddly's a hoot), the jailbird father (Joe Pantoliano) who's escaped to walk her down the aisle and a jilted boyfriend who won't take no for an answer.

There's some unnecessary grossness pandering to the teen market but otherwise it's a charmingly sweet and often very funny observation that love can be insane, but it's worth the madness.

WATER, CERT 12A, 117 MINS, SUBTITLED

The scene is 1938 India. Chuyia is eight-years-old. She doesn't remember recently getting married, but no matter. Her elderly husband's just died and now she's a widow.

Which, according to Hindu tradition, means for life. A life spent in an ashram with other widows, shunned by society as tainted.

But Chuyia's a spirited soul. She defies the domineering Madhumati who runs the household, wins over the devout but questioning Shakuntala (Seema Biswas) and is befriended by Kalyani (Lisa Ray), a young widow who, like many others, Madhumati pimps out as a prostitute to wealthy Brahmins.

But then along comes Narayan (John Abraham), an enlightened trainee lawyer and follower of the emergent Gandhi who dismisses repressive tradition and wishes to marry the defiant Kalyani.

Rather predictably, revelations and tragedy ensue, setting things on course for a melodramatic climax.

Not one to shy away from criticising India's outmoded religious and socio-cultural traditions, Deepa Mehta really raised the fundamentalist hackles with this one, forcing her to recast and reshoot the film after sets were destroyed and death threats made.

It's certainly provocative and fuelled with passionate indignation at the continued dehumanisation of women in the face of laws designed to afford them liberty.

But it suffers by shifting focus from Chuyia to the love story, doomed as much by Abraham's bland performance and several long musical sequences as it is by any religious and economic elements. It gathers force in the final act, but a little less bathos wouldn't have gone amiss.

PARADISE LOST, CERT 18, 93 MINS

What with Hostel, Severance and now this, it's clearly not a good time for Western tourists. However, rather than Eastern Europe, the destination here is Brazil where Alex (Josh Duhamel), his sister and her friend have their vacation interrupted when the local bus slides off a mountain road.

Rather than wait hours for a replacement, hooking up with a couple of obnoxious Brits (Desmond Askew, Max Brown) and Portuguese-speaking Aussie Pru (Melissa George), they decide to hike to the nearby village.

They're delighted to find they've stumbled into some secluded paradise with a great beach, a bar and party happy locals.

They're rather less delighted to wake up the next day, realise they were drugged and discover everything's been stolen save for the clothes they're wearing. Which, for the girls, naturally, just means skimpy swimwear.

After an altercation with the villagers, they're rescued by a friendly native who offers to take them to his safe house in the jungle until the next transport arrives.

Naturally, 'friendly native' is actually in cahoots with the 'bad guy', a deranged doctor who reckons it's time gringo tourists repaid Brazil by becoming reluctant multiple organ donors while being subjected to interminable monologues about First World exploitation.

So, a horror movie with a sociopolitical message, then. Unfortunately, having started off creepily enough everything falls horribly apart once the politics rear their head, heavy-handedly laid on between gory deaths and mutilations while the sadistic surgeon demonstrates his own moral superiority complex by abusing his Indian lackey.

Nor does it help that director John Stockwell chooses to shoot most of the tedious third act in underlit underwater caves where it's almost impossible to work out who's fighting who. Not that, by then, you'll really care.

THE HITCHER, CERT 18, 84 MINS

A pointless remake of the cult 80s horror, this swaps the lone motorist for an unengaging forgettable college couple, dumps all the original's quasi existentialism, homoerotic tension and supernatural intimations.

It also replaces Rutger Hauer's chilling manifestation of evil with a bored looking Sean Bean who puts less conviction into the role of the unstoppable psycho killer than he does his supermarket commercial voice overs.

And, instead of nerve-shredding suspense, director Dave Meyers opts for regulation car chases, firefights, explosions and a girl empowered with a gun finale.

Plus a plug for producer Michael Bay's remake of The Birds. Drive past and avoid.