Here the trouble really starts
Here, the trouble really starts.British director Mike Barker is meticulous in his plotting, so much so that you begin to wonder where all this is going and certainly how things will wind up. Tropico looks like a nightmare – poodle parlours and one woman eating a waffle in a diner – so you really do root for the charismatic couple, and back their dreams of escape. It’s an exciting, clever film, and rewards us with a gloriously unusual finale.Get Real is, in theme and spirit, somewhere between Grange Hill and Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing. Ben Silverstone plays a delicate 16-year-old, in love with the seemingly straight head boy at his Basingstoke school.
The film is issue-deep, and compassionate towards gay teenagers who are petrified of not only other people’s responses to their sexuality but, to a certain extent, their own.A Price Above Rubies, a forced, oddly impassive emancipatory drama, has been hanging around for a couple of years It’s easy to see why. Renee Zellweger plays a young Jewish mother, doubting her suitability as the partner of a religious scholar. Melodramatic and ill-played, it sourly and irritatingly exaggerates its Jewish milieu.Twin Dragons has identical twins (both played by Jackie Chan) separated at birth. The two are eventually reunited and mistaken for the other by their girlfriends Hee hee. The whole film is quite simply a showcase for Chan’s martial arts talent, and when I say whole, I mean it. Kick, whack, yelp, finito, phew.Satyajit Ray’s The Chess Players (1977) was aimed specifically at India’s Hindi-speaking audience.
Set in 1856 in Lucknow, it parallels the tale of chess players with the political tactics of the East India Company. This is a noble, thoughtful film, if a little spoilt by its more manic moments. The print itself isn’t that great, which is unusual for the scrupulous NFT.Prepare yourself for Parting Shots. A “jolly” (my arse) version of Death Wish starring ex-crooner Chris Rea and made by Michael Winner was never going to be much cop.
But if you ever needed proof that the sight of active humanity actually fills Winner with nausea, then here it is The human tangerine strikes again.. The Idiots
Director: Lars von Trier Starring: Bodil Jorgensen, Jens Albinus, Anne Louise Hassing (117 mins; 18)
Lars von Trier’s is a strange film. Not just self-applaudingly offbeat, like a lot of current cinema, but truly disturbing. This is one European production that never had a hope of being picked up by the Weinstein brothers for American distribution.
And even though I myself found it extraordinary, it shouldn’t be assumed that the review you are about to read is a straightforward recommendation. With , reader, you’re on your own.Much, but by no means all, of the film’s strangeness resides in its subject- matter. A band of what one presumes are students and dropouts withdraw into a vacant suburban house in Denmark from which they make regular sorties into the local town in the guise of ungainly, drooling … well, what? What exactly is one supposed to call them? Mentally retarded persons? Mental defectives? Morons? Yes, I know, all of these are, in ascending order of offensiveness, brutally un-PC terms. But then, as its title makes clear, is a brutally un-PC film. It would be a craven betrayal of its anarchic spirit were one to tiptoe around words, situations and behavioural disorders that its narrative serves up raw. Especially as the grossness of the antisocial “spassing” that the characters indulge in on screen – slobbering over their meals in a posh restaurant, “innocently” baring their breasts and flaunting their erections in a public baths – was patently intended less to convey a sense of mimetic accuracy and subtlety than to confront us with our own worst prejudices about the disabled.That would already be interesting, if not enough in itself to make as unsettling an object as it is.