By Roger Moore


FILM: Survivor
CAST: Milla Jovovich, Pierce Brosnan, Dylan McDermott, Angela Bassett, Roger Rees, Frances de la Tour
DIRECTION: James McTeigue

For more than a decade, nothing has screamed “B-movie” louder than seeing Milla Jovovich’s name in a movie’s credits.
But even in the worst of those Resident Evil action pictures, the model-thin Jovovich delivered fair value, packing a lot of punch for one so slight of build and a lot of intensity into roles that sometimes seemed thankless.
Survivor is what happens when you give her a “name” director — James McTeigue of V for Vendetta — and surround her with A-listers, or former A-listers.
Jovovich plays Kate, the security chief for the US embassy in London, a woman on the lookout for terrorists trying to passport their way into the US. Robert Forster is her boss, a little too quick to allow the occasional iffy scientist (Roger Rees) through passport control.
And Angela Bassett is the ambassador, the one who loses her temper if the wrong British feathers are ruffled in the name of “security”.
Kate gets too close to something big, people die, and even though her immediate supervisor (Dylan McDermott) has her back, the Brits and the CIA are after her.
“What am I now? A suspect? A target?”
Both, thanks to the assassin hired by terrorists to “make sure she doesn’t survive”. He is code named The Watchmaker, a talented bomber, sniper and all around killer, and he is played with ice and verve by Pierce Brosnan.
Survivor, predictable, short and shallow ticking clock thriller that it is, is more Three Days of the Condor than Taken. And thanks to its stars, it’s more engrossing and fun than it has any right to be. — Tribune News Service

Impossible fights and unlikely rescues


By Roger Moore


FILM: Outcast
CAST: Hayden Christensen, Nicolas Cage, Yifei Liu, Andy On
DIRECTION: Nicholas Powell

Outcast is what happens when stunt men direct.
The fights are marvellously choreographed, the swordplay splendid and the bloody body count high in director Nicholas Powell’s Middle East/Far East quest tale. The script? Derivative, dim and dull. The performances? Not much, either.
Essentially a Hayden Christensen vehicle with Nicolas Cage, Chinese scenery and swordsmanship to recommend it, Outcast is another variation on The Hidden Fortress. That’s the 1960s samurai film that George Lucas leaned on for the original Star Wars.
A Chinese king has died; his chosen heir, protected by his sister (Yifei Liu) is on the run. An opium-addicted knight, fleeing the demons committing mass murder in the Middle East, takes on the quest to get them to safety.
That would be Jacob (Christensen), whom we’ve seen slaughtering people, and then getting lectured about it by his sad-eyed mentor, Gallain (Cage).
The old knight suggested they get away from it all, head east. And that, apparently, is what they’ve done.
But in China, Shing (Andy On) is determined to get rid of his younger brother, the heir, and take the royal seal from him. So his Black Guards are hot on the trail of the young prince and his hot older sister. Help us, Jacob-wan, she pleads. You’re our only hope.
Christensen returns to the swordplay that launched his career with gusto.
Cage disappears for an hour of the film, returning as a bandit the Chinese call “The White Ghost”.
It’s all impossible fights, unlikely rescues and Jacob waking up in the care of this or that exotic woman tending to his wounds and getting him off the opium. -Tribune News Service

Droning narration


FILM: Beloved Sisters
CAST: Hannah Herzsprung, Florian Stetter, Henriette Confurius
DIRECTION: Dominik Graf

Voice-over narration in the movies is a crutch rarely used by anyone with the skill to use the visual medium to tell the story with pictures, as film was meant to do. But you can almost excuse the amaddening fill-in-between-the-pictures narration of the lengthy German bio-pic Beloved Sisters.
It’s a story of some importance and complexity, of the love triangle that entangled the great German poet/historian Friedrich Schiller and two sisters. The scandalous epic, set during the romanticism that swept across Europe and eventually led to the French Revolution, could have been a German Doctor Zhivago. It certainly has the length to justify that comparison.
But it’s something of a stiff, partly because of a somewhat less than charismatic lead, but mostly due to the droning narration, which gives Beloved Sisters the tone of a German history lecture, delivered in the original German.
Charlotte and Caroline von Lengefeld were German versions of Jane Austen heroines, cash-poor, needing to marry to preserve their widowed mother’s genteel life. Then, they meet young, dashing and headstrong Schiller, a struggling poet who might make them forget their fiscal matrimonial duties for a life of passion. Caroline (Hannah Herzsprung) does her familial duty and marries into the lesser nobility. But she holds the more impressionable younger sister Charlotte (Henriette Confurius) to the “secret oath” they took in girlhood — no sister must ever leave the other sister alone in the world. So they share Schiller’s attentions.
Schiller (Florian Stetter) fancies them both — the worldly Caroline a bit more.
It’s the late 18th century, and the revolutions in thought in the Age of Enlightenment have spawned revolutions in literature, science, historical research and printing, where mass dissemination of these new ideas have made Schiller celebrated, if not rich.
As the French Revolution boils over abroad, in Germany the nobility quivers in fear and tries to suppress romantics like Schiller and the women who love him.
But this mini-series length film never works up a romantic head of steam, never captures the frisson and ferment of a tumultuous age. - Tribune News Service

DVDs courtesy:
Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha

A fascinating tale told simply

By Troy Ribeiro


FILM: Big Eyes
CAST: Christoph Waltz, Amy Adams, Madeleine Arthur, Delaney Raye, Terence Stamp
DIRECTION: Tim Burton

Based on a true story that made headlines in the early 1970s in the US, Big Eyes is the tale of deceit and exploitation in the matrimonial sphere of an expressionist artist, where the husband takes credit for his wife’s work.
Narrated through the point of view of Dick Nolan, a senior columnist of a leading daily, director Tim Burton unveils the turbulent 10-year period in the life of the stifled artist and housewife, Margaret Ulbrickm, who painted portraits of sad, saucer-eyed waifs.
After a failed marriage in 1958, Margaret travels along with her young daughter from North Carolina to North Beach in San Franciso where she meets a smooth talker and fellow struggling artist Walter Keane, who woos her.
With an unhappy marriage behind her and a grim future before her, Margaret happily accepts Walter’s proposal for marriage. After a short honeymoon in Hawaii, high on romance Margaret simply signs off her latest work with her newly acquired surname ‘Keane’.
In the meanwhile, Walter manages to display her work along with his in an upmarket nightclub owned by Enrico Banducci. Disgruntled with the location of the display area, a fight with Enrico leads to headlines and interest in the paintings. And soon Walter sells Margaret’s work as his own.
He cajoles her with “People do not buy lady art. There is no market for it”. He also assures her that now that they are one, the sale benefits “the family”.
Margaret, though hurt, gives in. Walter steadily builds an empire marketing her paintings and posters as his creations.
Burton handles the compelling subject deftly and delicately. Overall, Big Eyes is a fascinating tale simply told with good performances.  –IANS

DVDs courtesy: Kings Electronics, Doha