Reviews

Films

Talk to Me

Directed by Kasi Lemmons; starring Don Cheadle, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Martin Sheen, Cedric The Entertainer, Taraji P Henson

Talk to Me is an equally disappointing "inspired by real events" story set in the 60s. Here the film's producer, Don Cheadle, plays the black criminal Petey Greene, who discovers his vocation as a DJ in jail.

After his release in 1966 he uses the aggressive technique identified at the time by Tom Wolfe as "mau-mauing" to get a job at a Washington, DC radio station owned by a nervous white liberal (Martin Sheen) and programmed by an educated, middle-class black (Chiwetel Ejiofor), whose life he changes.

Cheadle does not convince that Petey was a great broadcaster or a comic in the same league as Richard Pryor, Godfrey Cambridge and Dick Gregory.

August Rush

Directed by Kirsten Sheridan; starring Freddie Highmore, Keri Russell, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Robin Williams, Terrence Howard

In the breathtakingly banal August Rush, an Irish rock star (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) has a great one-night stand with a celebrated cellist (Keri Russell) on a New York rooftop in 1995, and the fruit of their union (hidden from them by her father) turns out to be a prodigy who makes Mozart look like Salieri.

Twelve years later they all come together when Dad is making a comeback at a rock venue, Mom is playing Elgar with the New York Philharmonic and the lad (who's run away from an orphanage, been discovered busking in Washington Square, and given a scholarship to the Juilliard School) is conducting his first magnum opus in Central Park.

It takes not just the biscuit but the whole Huntley and Palmer factory for sentimentality, strained coincidences, romantic tosh, and Robin Williams doing what he does worst as a Fagin figure living off the earnings of juvenile street musicians in Manhattan.

Wristcutters: A Love Story

Directed by Goran Dukic; starring Patrick Fugit, Shannyn Sossamon, Shea Whigham, Tom Waits

The feature debut of the Croatian-American Goran Dukic is yet another mystic stroll in the no-man's land between life and death, in this case a special purgatory for suicides located somewhere in the less scenic corners of Arizona. There are some interesting conceits lurking here, but they're never developed.

Shrooms

Directed by Paddy Breathnach; starring Lindsey Haun, Sean McGinley

In this derivative slasher horror flick, a party of dislikeable American students are lured to the backwoods of Ireland to sample the local hallucinatory mushrooms and die bloodily in turn. Are they being killed by the ghosts of sadistic priests from a former Catholic reformatory, by inbred locals who appear to audition for Deliverance 2, or by one of their own number? I'm not telling.

Jesus Camp

Directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady

An admirable documentary. The frightening Jesus Camp is a cool, deeply disturbing account of the way the American religious right is shaping the minds of its children to take over the nation in the name of fundamentalism, ignorance and bigotry.

The Guardian

(China Daily 11/29/2007 page20)