Picturenose

Stolen chances

A slick, well-made effort from Spanish director Jaime Marques (El Paraíso perdido (1999)) - writers Juan Ibáñez and Enrique López Lavigne offer an insight into the life and mind of Álex (Juan José Ballesta), a child abandoned by his kleptomaniac mother after she’d taught him how to ‘lift’ from passers-by, and the relationship he forms, now as a young man (with an uncanny resemblance to Matt Damon), with attractive middle-class student Sara (María Valverde), whom he promises to teach all that he knows about the fine art of street theft.

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Learning curve

The clear favourite to take the top prize at Cannes (and it duly lived up to expectations, scooping the Palme D’Or), Laurent Cantet’s seminal study of ‘the blackboard jungle’ (which fully deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Richard’s Brooks 1955 work, Robert Mulligan’s Up the Down Staircase (1967) and James Clavell’s To Sir, With Love (1967)) features former teacher François Bégaudeau (who also wrote the screenplay from his own autobiography) as himself during a school year spent with a class of 14-year-olds, trying to impart lessons in French and life.

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Too black and white
Bille August (Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1997), Les Miserables (1998)) heads up this multi-European country co-production, but his take on the tale of the relationship between a white South African prison guard and Nelson Mandela is flawed from the outset.

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Picturenose would take this opportunity to pay tribute to Hélène Noël, late of Brussels - a good friend of Colin’s and the love of James’s life, who was taken from us way too soon, at the age of 42, on 16 June 2008. Hélène was a woman of much love and many gifts and talents, not least of which was her ability to light up a room with her smile. A frequent contributor to key Brussels mags, she also loved film (and Ireland), as the following review, previously published on UP Front Brussels, shows. Thank you for your attention.

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Angst Lee
There’s always one, isn’t there? Well, this ever-so ‘umble critic is putting his reputation on the line - Brokeback Mountain really isn’t quite as good as everyone else seems to believe. There, I’ve said it. Accusations of hard-heartedness may follow, but that doesn’t change the fact that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) director Ang Lee’s simplistic, overindulgent work is little more than a competently made ode to nature and male-bonding.

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Dench does demented
Guess what? Another film I enjoyed. The difference this time being that it was one of a collection that was recently purchased by my good lady. Our taste in films differs quite a bit from time to time and having seen the cover of the DVD and the dreaded words ‘Starring Dame Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett’ I thought I’d be in for an evening of unbridled chick-flickery.

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Towering triumph

Superb. Just out-and-out superb. If you came for a scene-by-scene deconstruction and to hear how utterly pretentious it is, look away now. Regular readers will know that I have the attention span of a not-too-bright goldfish when it comes to films over ninety minutes long, but this one is two and a half hours or thereabouts and I don’t believe there was a single foot of film wasted. I am in serious danger of sounding like a union representative for the Spanish Film Council, having recently given The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) such a blinding review, but the writing and direction are so tight and fresh that I believe we should hand the film industry to Spain for a few years.

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Myth-building

“Myth,” the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss wrote, “is language.” Insofar as that language develops exponentially over time, so do components of a story, and can be individualized as ‘mythemes’. But, what Levi-Strauss only hints at, is that at the kernel of myth is – however murkily, and however mediated – a truth. It becomes a primal means of language to describe history and the present and the human condition.

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Angry young boy
Young writer-director Shane Meadows is fast making a name for himself as a social commentator in the mould of Ken Loach – his films, such as Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002) and A Room for Romeo Brass (1999) are uncompromising and unforgiving, but have a solid respect for audiences who want to be entertained, rather than preached to. Read more »

Amazing Amélie

Pre-Iraq II, Time magazine ran a cover story rationalizing the ‘freedom fries’ line - WHY FRANCE IS DIFFERENT. Interestingly, the cover star was Audrey Tautou, which was a pic ed’s nice take on softening the editorial frog-bashing. This was indicative of the unarguable fact that nobody could quite rationalize - beyond Tautou’s indescribable beauty - what made Amélie (as it was known in the anglophone territories) such a sensation in spite of its unashamedly atavistic celebration of a dying Frenchness, right down to Amelie’s clogs, the Catholic notion of charity, the Proustian notion of nostalgia.

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