Reviews

Films

The Eye

Directed by David Moreau, Xavier Palud, starring Jessica Alba, Alessandro Nivola

This is a Hollywood reworking of the 2002 horror-thriller by the Thai film-makers Danny and Oxide Pang, which itself owed much to John Carpenter's The Eyes of Laura Mars from 1978.

Jessica Alba plays a blind violinist who gets a cornea transplant and can see again but finds herself plagued with horrifying visions, courtesy of the previous, traumatized donor. This is due to something scientific called "cellular memory". It's the "peptides", explains Jessica's hunkily concerned doctor, Alessandro Nivola: "They connect the mind and body." Molecular biologists up and down the land will be intrigued to hear that. Reasonably entertaining.

Three and Out

Directed by Jonathan Gershfield, starring Mackenzie Crook, Colm Meaney

This could have been a satire of a spiritually dead London where urban wage-slaves grind back and forth to work on a crumbling underground system, crammed into carriages with, in TS Eliot's words, "only the growing terror of nothing to think about".

Instead it's just another depressing, mediocre, muddy-looking British film that wastes an awful lot of talent.

Mackenzie Crook plays Paul, a depressed London subway train-driver who has two people fall in front of his train in a single week. His colleagues whisper that there's an unofficial "three- and-out" rule: If three unfortunate souls wind up under his wheels within one month, he gets pensioned off with a mouthwatering lump-sum of 10 years' salary.

So Paul sets out to find someone who wants to commit suicide: He will give them a cash advance on his future payout and they can live it up for one last weekend before chucking themselves under his train.

The scene removes, bafflingly, to the touristy-picturesque locale of the Lake District (did funding depend on this?) where we meet Tommy's long neglected wife, played by Imelda Staunton - too good for this nonsense. Their grown-up sexy daughter Frankie is played by Gemma Arterton, who does lots of catwalk posing in her beret and is more wooden than all the Woodentops combined.

Stop-Loss

Directed by Kimberly Peirce, starring Ryan Phillippe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Kimberly Peirce was the director who made the 1999 Oscar-winner Boys Don't Cry. This long-delayed follow-up, about traumatized troops back from Iraq, is completely pathetic: thoroughly feeble and softcore, with plenty of macho-sentimental male bonding and an insidious ending which made one suspect that Dick Cheney has been running screenwriting seminars.

Ryan Phillippe plays Brandon King, a patriotic Texan boy who volunteered for the army after 9/11 and fought bravely in the increasingly horrible war in Iraq; he returns to his hometown looking forward to an honorable retirement in civvy street.

But then the US Army invokes the little-known "stop loss" clause buried in his enlistment contract: They can and do order him to report for another tour of duty in Iraq. Brandon himself goes on the run from the military police; increasingly despairing, delusional and violent, he is faced with a terrible choice of abandoning his American identity and starting a new life in Mexico or Canada.

It sounds edgy, but it's actually about as subversive as Top Gun. Fundamentally incurious about the war itself, the film allows the 9/11-Iraq connection to pass unchallenged and issues relating to soldiers' trauma are finally simply abandoned. There's an unforgivably naive and tendentious scene showing a badly burned and mutilated soldier in hospital being radiantly cheerful and loyal about the whole situation. And that ending is very, very shaming indeed. The Guardian

(China Daily 04/29/2008 page20)