A spray of delight

Jul 19 2007 Mike Davies reviews the week's cinema releases

• HAIRSPRAY * * * * *
  Cert PG, 116 mins
  The story of how overweight Baltimore teenager Tracy Turnblad landed a part on and brought racial integration to 60s TV's Corny Collins dance show, the original John Waters satirical comedy wasn't a huge hit when released back in 1988.

However, aside from launching the career of Rikki Lake, over the years it's become something of a cult classic, apparently very popular on DVD with adolescent American girls' slumber parties.

Its biggest boost, though, came in 2002 when it was transformed into a Broadway musical, going on to win eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical, as well as a Grammy for the soundtrack album.

With a cast that includes Darlene Love and Sky Kids star Alexa Vega, it's still packing them in Stateside and finally arrives in the West End this October starring Michael Ball and Mel Smith as Tracy's mom and dad.

But first, here's the film adaptation, directed and choreographed by Adam Shankman, the man who gave you The Wedding Planner, Bringing Down The House, The Pacifier and, oh dear, Cheaper By The Dozen 2.

Yes, the thought fills you with dread, doesn't it. But breathe easy, a former dancer and veteran choreographer he's positively inspired here, investing the film with a boisterous high energy to match its 50s MGM pastels and always keeping the full.

Adding three new numbers to the original production's tally, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman's songs are to die for too, spot on pastiches evoking the classic days of the Brill Building and vintage Spector pop.

Indeed, it's hard to stop yourself applauding at the end of things like the opening Good Morning Baltimore, Welcome To The 60s and I Can Hear The Bells.

As always, the role of the lacquered up Tracy is played by a newcomer, here in the fabulous form of Nikki Blonsky who takes the film in her teeth from the moment she appears and never lets go.

The plot's simple enough. A dedicated fan of the aerosol-sponsored show with the 'the nicest whitest kids in town', when one of the ozone demolishing dancers has to take a nine month sabbatical, Tracy turns up for the auditions with best friend Penny (Amanda Bynes doing a great turn in as the lollipop sucking, wide-eyed doofus Lolita) only to get short shrift from Velma Von

Tussle (Michelle Pfeiffer), the station's faded beauty queen bitch racist manager and mother to teen diva Amber (Brittany Snow).

However, when Linc Larkin (High School Musical's Zak Efron), the show's cool king hunk, spots her bumping and grinding with Seaweed (Elijah Kelley) and the other black kids in detention (for 'inappropriate hair height'), he arranges it for Corny to catch her in action too.

Next thing you know, Tracy's the show's new sensation, much to the resentment of Amber and her mother; especially when Linc starts falling for her and, rather than a token once a month, she wishes every day could be Negro Day.

And, so the stage is set for machinations to get her off the show while Tracy in turn joins Seaweed's record store mom and Negro Day host Motormouth Maybelle (Queen Latifah) in staging their own anti-segregation civil rights protest.

Latifah is terrific, her I Know Where I've Been one of the film's showstopping numbers. But then everyone's glorious; from Waters' hilarious cameo as the neighbourhood flasher, to Allison Janney's scene stealing turn as Penny's Bible-thumping mother, Christopher Walken as Tracy's joke store owning doting dad Wilbur and X-Men's James Marsden revealing unexpected singing talent as Corny.

Of course, there's one more name to mention. Looking decidedly more voluptuous than either drag queen Divine in the original movie or Harvey Fierstein's stage incarnation, John Travolta dons the dress and fat suit as Tracy's overly protective, insecure mom, Edna.

Destined to be cited as a highpoint of his career and barely concealing a constant smile behind the latex, this is his first musical in 30 years.

He still cuts the hoofing mustard, his light on the feet Timeless To Me Fred and Ginger soft shoe shuffle with 'husband' Walken and finale homage to Tina Turner (with sly nod to Pulp Fiction) are unalloyed pleasures.

It does soften the original's sharp satire into more family friendly form but, hey this is easily best Broadway adaptation since Chicago, a sheer big feelgood grin pleasure from start to finish and easily the year's most enjoyable movie. You Can't Stop The Beat sings everyone in the rousing finale. And you won't want to.

• FIREHOUSE DOG * *
  Cert PG, 111 mins
  Sentimental and hackneyed, this painfully over-long tale of a pampered Hollywood dog star accidentally separated from his luxury lifestyle and winding up the mascot of an underperforming fire station, doesn't go anywhere you haven't been before in other four-legged family fare.

From the moment the pawticipants are brought together you know that red-haired Irish terriers
Rexxx will bring neglected 12-year-old son, Shane (Josh Hutcherson) and his fire captain widowed father Connor (Bruce Greenwood), still grieving for his brother's death in the line of duty, back together.

That he'll whip the motley crew into shape and save the beleaguered station from closure. And that he'll find real fulfilment himself as a real working dog in the process. Heck, he even tidies up Shane's bedroom! Eat your heart out Lassie.

There's a nice touch in that boy and dog don't immediately bond. In fact he can't wait to be rid of the 'ugly stinkin' mutt' as he puts it on the Found posters.

And I guess there's some amusement to be had with references to Rexxx's appearances in Jurassic Bark and The Fast and the Furriest and a pastiche of the iconic Bo Derek scene in 10 as our canine hero recalls the Dalmatian that broke his heart.

But, really, that's it. Faced with cliched characters and a scene stealing tail-wagger, the cast mug along as best they can but you can tell nobody's heart's much in it, an air of indifference even an audience of young animal lovers might well share.

• EDMOND * * *
  Cert 15, 82 mins
  Anyone familiar with such plays as Sexual Perversity In Chicago, Oleanna and Glengarry Glen Ross, will know David Mamet doesn't give audiences an easy ride, either with his mannered Pinterseque dialogue or in exploring the darker, more unpleasant aspects of human nature.

But, a little known 1982 one-acter, Edmond really does stick its hand in the morally fetid guts and lay the results on the table.

It's a dark night of the soul for middle-manger Edmond (William H Macy) who, responding to coincidence, calls in at a tarot reader on his way home.

Told 'you are not where you belong', he sets out to find out where he does. Walking out on a tired marriage (to Mamet's own wife, Rebecca Pidgeon), he winds up in a downtown New York bar where a sour stranger (Mamet regular Joe Mantegna) spews out a litany of bile against gays, blacks and women.

Having struck a chord with his own frustrations, a naive Edmond then proceeds on an all-night bender through the city's seedy underbelly, tight-fistedly haggling over the price of sex with a bar girl (Denise Richards), a hooker (Mena Suvari) and a peep show dancer (Bai Ling).

Somewhere along the way, a visit to a pawn shop yields a knife which will figure dramatically in encounters with a dreadlocked pimp and a cafe waitress (Julia Stiles) before Edmond's repressed inner aggression boils over, the cops come calling and catharsis and irony pay a visit as he finds peace in his prison cell.

Jazz soaked, claustrophobic and moodily intense, there's a deep seam of black humour playing around Mamet's politically incorrect examination of racism, homophobia and misogyny and, as the meek everyman stripped down to his sociopathic core, Macy delivers a towering performance.

Whether you have the stomach to endure the film's relentless sordid nastiness without feeling in need of a shower is another matter.

• GOLDEN DOOR * * *
  Cert PG 118 Mins, Subtitled
  The immigrant experience gets another going over from Emanuele Crialese whose follow-up to 2002's quirky Respiro charts the journey of a peasant family from early 1900s Sicily to America. Or at least to its Ellis Island gateway and processing station.

The opening sequence of widowed father Salvatore (Vincenzo Amato) and son Angelo scrambling barefooted up a mountain to a holy shrine to seek for a sign affords a striking image.

And Crialese provides several more in the course of the film, most notably the scene as the ship laden with immigrants pulls away from the dock, physically and metaphorically severing them from their past and home.

Rather less successful are the several surreal fantasies of giant vegetables and rivers of milk which, sparked by picture postcards and myths, inform Salvatore and his fellow travellers' visions of the new world.

The film divides into three chapters. The first introduces Salvatore's family, which also includes a deaf mute second son and a superstitious old mother (a marvellous gnarly exercise in dignity by Aurora Quattrocchi), and the two young women in need of husbands who will accompany them, and details the preparations to leave the poverty of their native land.

The second covers the gruelling journey, travelling steerage in almost slave ship conditions, a harrowing storm, and the growing relationship between Salvatore and Lucy (Charlotte Gainsbourg), the middle class Englishwoman they met at departure and an object of much interest among the ship's arrogant wealthier passengers.

The third, and by far the strongest, records the humiliations at Ellis Island as the single women are picked up by their pre-arranged husbands and officials subject the new arrivals to intensive physical and mental examinations to determine whether they measure up to the promised land's requirements or should be summarily deported.

It's often lyrically beautiful to look and the performances are fine, but it never quite hits the dramatic mark, leaving you feeling you should have been more emotionally engaged in the family's ordeals and their open ended futures.