Reviews

Films

Imagine: John Lennon

Directed by Andrew Solt, starring John Lennon, Yoko Ono

An artist that had many faces and pioneered a brand of personally insightful songwriting, John Lennon was also a noted performer in front of the camera. He could brandish a cutting wit, act the buffoon and do his angry man routine and here, Imagine tries to dig beneath the surface of these personas to find the real Lennon. Unfortunately, what is revealed is yet another fragment of his personality - the warm, fatherly side - not a complete picture.

Imagine is made up of old Beatles material and old interviews but the big selling point is the rare home footage of Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono after the Beatles had parted ways. Home movies can have their subjects at their most self-conscious. Much of the time they will play up to the camera, just as Lennon does here. It's only the camera that they don't know is filming them that will reveal the true picture, anything else is another form of role-play. Still, there are a few moments outside of the Lennon estate that make for interesting viewing.

Two standoffs - one with cartoonist Al Capp and another with New York Times journalist Gloria Emerson - show Lennon as a crabby star on the verge of tantrum. Neither Capp nor Emerson is buying his new post-Beatles-Give-Peace-a-Chance mantra and it clearly frustrates Lennon, whose only form of retort is to talk over the top of them. It's the later years alone with Yoko Imagine attempts to demystify but if anything it sells us yet another image: that of John and Yoko wandering through their gardens as ethereal hippies in the morning mist.

Ben Davey

House of Wax

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, starring Elisha Cuthbert, Paris Hilton

It will perhaps go down in history as the film where Paris Hilton dies a terrible, terrible death, which is more a testament to shrewd casting than anything else. Why? Well, it's not because Hilton is the next Katharine Hepburn - no-simply put, without Hilton in the picture, House of Wax might not have been remembered for anything in particular. A derivative, highly stylized modern horror, this is just one of a spate of recent chop-'em-ups to cut and paste entire segments from 1970s films that achieved more savagery with lower budgets.

Here's the story - and stop when you've heard this before. A group of young fun-lovers are on their way to a football game when they decide to camp out in the woods before continuing on. Amid their beer-drinking, sexual innuendo-slinging revelry, an ominous looking vehicle shows up and then pulls off. The next morning one of the teens' cars has been sabotaged so two of the group catch a lift to the nearest town. That town, a throwback to the 1950s, boasts a gas station, a church, a deserted cinema and a wax museum, where the exhibits are startlingly life-like.

Borrowing from an extensive menu of fright flicks such as Psycho, Friday the 13th and The Blair Witch Project, House of Wax is at least an honest copycat. And in keeping with the brutality of a new wave of horror movies where everything old is new again, the bloodletting is gruesome. A big budget also helps make the skewerings, decapitations, stabbings, slicing and gluing all the more detailed. But we've been here, done this countless times and ultimately this "re-imagining" offers nothing that was not done better by one of the many films it imitates.

BD

(China Daily 09/11/2007 page20)