Movie reviews
Set in 1987, just as hair metal has reached its zenith, Dennis Dupree’s (Alec Baldwin) LA club, The Bourbon Room, is the place to be. The wolves are at the door, though, as Dennis is losing money and the bible-bashing mayor’s wife Patricia Whitmore (Catherine Zeta-Jones) has promised to close the den of iniquity down. But hope comes in the shape of shady rock manager Paul Gill (Paul Giamatti) who persuades megastar Stacee Jaxx (Tom Cruise) to play his final gig there.
Meanwhile, Malin Akerman’s Rolling Stone journalist wants an interview with the permanently zonked Stacee, and club barman Drew (Diego Boneta) and waitress Sherrie (Julianne Hough) do their best not to fall in love to a Journey song (yes, that one). It’s all entertaining fluff with lots of big hair and leather pants but Rock Of Ages isn’t as much fun as it should be. Cruise has a ball sending himself up (again) but hamstrung playing a perpetually drugged up, burned-out rockstar he can’t cut loose. And although it’s great to hear those classic air-punchers again, the songs here are watered down sexless Glee versions. Disappointing.
Adapted by director David Cronenberg from Don DeLillo’s novel, Cosmopolis (16s) stars Robert Pattinson as Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager, crossing a traffic-choked Manhattan in a limousine in search of a haircut. That ‘haircut’ might be intended as a gag given that the backdrop to the story is the economic crisis, and that Packer’s personal fortune is wiped out during the course of the day, but it’s difficult to separate the deliberate humour in Cosmopolis from what is unintentionally hilarious. What might work well in a novel — a man contemplates his rise and fall from the comfort of a limousine — falls very flat indeed as a film. Pattinson is largely blameless here, forced as he is to play a character who is little more than an avatar for soulless greed. The problem is that Cronenberg has given full rein to a self-indulgent polemic on the self-destructive elements of human nature, as characters — played by Samantha Morton, Paul Giamatti and Juliette Binoche, among others — take their turn to engage Packer in pseudo-philosophical twaddle. It would be harsh to say that this will be the worst film you’ll see this year, but it’s a contender for most boring.
Set in contemporary Paris, Polisse (16s) explores the personal and professional lives of the policemen and women who make up the Child Protection Unit of the Belleville area. It’s a tough beat that involves rescuing children from prostitution, physical abuse, neglect and rape, and the CPU tend to operate as a tightly knit family. Melissa (Maiwenn), a photographer detailed to highlight the unit’s operations, offers the audience an insight into the workings of the group, who thrive on mutual trust, a passion for children’s rights and unsettling gallows humour. The team’s balance is put into jeopardy when outsider Maiwenn — the actress also directs her co-written screenplay — begins an affair with Fred (Joey Starr). Even if their story provides the narrative backbone, the real story is the almost hypnotic parade of abused children who flow past on the screen. The documentary-style, hand-held cinematography gives the film an intimacy that some viewers may find unsettling. That said, Polisse is a riveting piece of work that deserves to find an international audience.
“We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” The first of the ‘blockbusters’ that prompted Hollywood to re-imagine how it made movies back in the 1970s, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (12A) gets re-released on digital this week. It’s likely there are few in Western civilisation who don’t know the story of how a great white shark terrorises the small coastal town of Amity on police chief Brody’s (Roy Schneider) watch, but despite its humble beginnings and relatively tiny budget, Jaws is one of the iconic modern movies that fully deserves to be seen on the big screen.
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