Reviews

Films

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Directed by Nicholas Stoller, starring Jason Segel, Kristen Bell, Mila Kunis, Russell Brand

Judd Apatow's comedies are always watchable and sometimes hilarious, but with the latest to emerge under his aegis, I have to admit it is getting harder to defend them against the charge of misogyny.

This is basically a vehicle for its writer and leading man Jason Segel, an Apatow repertory player who was in the TV show Freaks and Geeks. He plays Peter, a slackerish and likable-if-not-lovable guy who is dating hot TV star Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell). Sarah dumps him in favor of drawling Brit pop singer Aldous Snow, played by Russell Brand, who is actually the best thing in the film.

Deeply upset, Peter goes on holiday to Hawaii, only to find that Sarah and Aldous are staying at the same resort, delirious with nonstop sex. There are some laughs, but not that many, and a weird, nagging undertow of self-pity and resentment of beautiful women making honest guys' lives a misery.

Bandit Queen

Directed by Shekhar Kapur, starring Seema Biswas, Nirmal Pandey, Manoj Bajpai, Rajesh Vivek

She was a warrior queen who rallied men into battle and won the hearts of her people. No, not Elizabeth I. Before Shekhar Kapur set his sights on the Virgin Queen, he made this brutal epic about Phoolan Devi, a bandit who became a household name in India in the early 1980s.

With palpable outrage Kapur shows Devi bartered into marriage, then raped, imprisoned and later kidnapped by a gang of outlaws - before becoming one of its leaders.

For all its unapologetic myth-making (its accuracy has been questioned, not least by Devi herself), Bandit Queen offers a terrible ratcheting-up of violence, ending with her bloody revenge on a village in which she was gang-raped. Devi's life was no less interesting after it was put on film. Released from prison, she went into politics and was assassinated in 2001.

Colossal Youth

Directed by Pedro Costa, starring Ventura, Vanda Duarte, Beatriz Duarte, Gustavo Sumpta, Cila Cardoso

Running at over two and a half hours with virtually no plot to speak of, Colossal Youth, by the Portuguese director Pedro Costa, is extraordinary and otherworldly, but also an utterly unforgiving piece of film-making.

Not for the first time, Costa is in Lisbon's poorest neighborhoods, filming among its most marginal residents, each telling a story from their own lives in a kind of hybrid docu-drama.

They declaim lines, stripped of emotion, which, when it works - and it doesn't always - heroically fortifies their meaning.

Among them is Ventura, a retired west African laborer who makes visits to people he calls his children (though none is related to him). Most moving is Vanda, a heroin addict who talks about motherhood and her little daughter.

Costa frames exactingly, like a still-life artist, frequently putting his characters' faces in the shade, finding virtue instead in a wall stained like bruise or a bashed-in old sofa. Frustrating perhaps, but hypnotic if you can stick with it. The Guardian

(China Daily 04/30/2008 page20)