Taking on the system in Body Of Lies
Nov 21 2008 by Mike Davies, Birmingham Post
Christ’s genetic material. She says she can use that as a cure, but first he’ll have to get her pregnant.
Between Huston hamming flashbacks to Victor’s on-the-run childhood, abandoned to then be plucked from foster homes, the behaviour of mum’s fellow patients, Macdonald’s secret and a subplot involving the supercilious theme park boss, it’s all bizarrely convoluted and lacking sympathetic characters. It is, however, a frequently wildly funny warped romcom about human perversity, love and redemption.
SPECIAL PEOPLE * * *
Cert 12A 78 mins
As with his debut, Large, Birmingham writer-director Justin Edgar’s latest has been extended from a short. Pretentious failed director Jasper (Dominic Coleman doing Steve Coogan) sets out to make a film with the three wheelchair-bound students who comprise his film course class; prickly Jess (Robyn Frampton), aspiring auteur Scott (David Proud) and surly self-loathing Dave (Jason Maza).
A simple plot about Jess trying to wheel herself up hill as a metaphor for disability, the day-long countryside shoot descends into fiasco while the trio suss the project is more about Jasper’s last gasp ambitions than them.
A sub-plot involving the embittered Dave’s cruel dismissal of love interest Anais (Sasha Hardway) as a cripple, feels a little forced, but otherwise, largely improvised by its impressive and mostly disabled cast, it has a sharp sarcastic humour and unsentimentally pertinent observations about patronising political correctness.
QUARANTINE * * *
Cert 18 89 mins
Given the track record for Hollywood remakes, you’d expect the worst from this shot-by-shot copy of Spanish thriller [rec] that relocates the action to LA. Good news, then, it’s quite good.
Accompanying firemen Jake (Jay Hernandez), George (Johnathon Schaech), and their crew on a call out, TV reporter Angela (Jennifer Carpenter) and cameraman Scott (Steve Harris) find an old woman’s locked herself in her flat. Things quickly turn nasty when the old dear bites a chunk from a cop’s neck and a firemen plummets down the stairwell.
Next thing they know, the authorities are sealing them in, there’s armed guards round the building and a mutant strain of rabies is turning residents into cannibalistic crazies as the infection spreads. As the terror mounts, Angela continues to interview survivors, a feverish seven-year-old girl among them.
Again filmed from the cameraman’s hand-held perspective (this time you do see his face), the frenzied movement can become incoherent, but does capture the mounting panic, not to mention graphic gore (including zombie kids) which, in a blackly comic addition, now features someone being beaten to death with the camera lens.
If you’ve seen [rec], it won’t hold the same impact, but those coming to it fresh can look forward to real scares and an ending that may require a change of underwear.
BLINDNESS * * *
Cert 18 120 mins
When an unnamed American city’s residents inexplicably start becoming blind, their vision a milky whiteness, a panicky government responds by quarantining them under armed guard inside an old mental health facility.
Among the equally unnamed inmates is the doctor (Mark Ruffalo) who treated the first victim, along with the patients in his waiting room at the time, including a boy, Woman With Dark Glasses (Alice Braga) and Man With Black Eye Patch (Danny Glover). His wife (Julianne Moore) is there too. She, however, can still see, a fact she keeps from the other afflicted and the authorities to act as guide and witness. As the epidemic spreads, the
