Reviews

Films

Lagerfeld Confidential

Directed by Rodolphe Marconi

In the course of this unctuously celebratory, but occasionally entertaining documentary study by Rodolphe Marconi, the legendary fashion designer and photographer Karl Lagerfeld (pictured) looks worryingly like Will Ferrell's character in Zoolander. Of course it is fairer to say that Ferrell looks like Karl Lagerfeld. For good or ill, Lagerfeld is the true original.

The grey hair tied back into a ponytail, the dark glasses, the chunky rings on all fingers, the bizarre quasi-clerical collars: It all makes up an unmistakable brand-image which Lagerfeld has shrewdly cultivated for decades.

We see Lagerfeld proprietorially kissing Nicole Kidman on both cheeks at a Chanel event, and poor old Baz Luhrmann, who had clearly been squiring her for the evening, is made to look very much the beta-male. When Lagerfeld is interviewed one-on-one, he is droll, mischievous, enlightening.

But these interviews only account for a few minutes of the film; the rest is fantastically boring fly-on-the-wall stuff, and the strident and repeated use of Vivaldi's Four Seasons on the soundtrack is incidentally very lame.

There is one very revealing moment. Lagerfeld pats a female colleague on the arm, and she winces as good-naturedly as she can. Being banged by his rings is painful. Lagerfeld's mannerisms and stage-props are a kind of armor which make intimacy impossible.

30 Days of Night

Directed by David Slade, starring Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Danny Huston, Ben Foster

More Halloween fun - if that is the word. Some of Dracula's heirs in the modern vampire genre arrive in this adaptation of a graphic novel series by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith. The producer is horror veteran Sam Raimi.

In Barrow, Alaska, one of the northernmost towns in the United States, there is darkness for 30 days in winter. For the purposes of the movie, this period arrives promptly at a certain date, like the lights getting switched off, and this is when a group of vampires led by Danny Huston with wacky pointed teeth and black contact lenses shows up to chomp away vigorously upon the exposed fleshy parts of innocent townsfolk.

Their only protection is a sheriff, played by Josh Hartnett, an actor for whom the word "stolid" might have been invented. There isn't much riffing or variation on the traditional vampire theme, in the manner of the Blade movies, though one character ventures the opinion that it might not be effective to use an ultra-violet lamp on the vampires just because they are historically afraid of sunlight.

No Smoking

Directed by Anurag Kashyap, starring John Abraham, Joy Fernandas, Paresh Rawal, Ranvir Shorey

Headstrong smoker John Abraham gets the urge to kick the habit when his wife walks out on him. As he puffs his way through every waking hour, he tries a hard-hitting and highly secretive rehabilitation program run by Hitler-loving Baba Bengali, whose methods include kidnapping relatives and amputating fingers at the slightest infraction of the rules.

Fans of 80s horror may recall a similar scenario played out by James Woods in the Stephen King-scripted anthology movie Cat's Eye. While no screen credit is offered to King, it's clear his tale directly forms this film's basis, making it kind of a first for Indian cinema. It could be the beginning of a trend; here's hoping Carrie gets the full-on Bollywood treatment. While a slack pace, unsettled internal logic and a goofy subplot undo much of the hard work by director Kashyap, the film has a slick look.

The Guardian

(China Daily 10/30/2007 page20)