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For the weekend beginning 7 March, here are the films in focus:
The Bank Job [rating: 7]
(The Bank Job is) efficient without being pedestrian, tweaking the suspense here and there to add the proper amount of intrigue to the elements.
During its heyday, the heist genre was a quick witted assemblage of action and antics. It represented a combination of smarts and savoir faire, breaking and entering tricks matched to jet set cocktail party wits. In recent years, the mechanics have taken over the mirth, turning many of these tales into high tech actioners with low levels of actual fun. Roger Donaldson’s The Bank Job doesn’t change that formula. In fact, it frequently embraces the serious side of its material much more than is necessary. But when you’re dealing with a supposedly true story, involving the loftiest levels of British Intelligence and the Royal Family itself, humor is hard to find. read full review…
Sputnik Mania [rating: 7]
...when it plays to our sense of selective memory and fills in the blanks on issues long forgotten, Sputnik Mania is masterful.
No one remembers Vantage. It crashed and burned on the launch pad. A few may recall Explorer, our first legitimate unmanned orbital mission. But mention the name Sputnik, the Soviet satellite that literally shocked the world, and you’ll get all kinds of learned and intransigent responses. In 1957, the US seemed like heaven on earth. Post war prosperity was creating a considerable Middle Class, while an unprecedented military strength suggested a sense of infallibility.
But when Russia launched the 185 lb metal sphere into the ionosphere, it signaled the start of two major international confrontations - the Cold War and the Space Race. According to David Hoffman in his excellent archival documentary Sputnik Mania, no other action would push the globe closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than this peaceful scientific folly to explore the unknown mysteries of our galaxy.read full review…
10,000 BC [rating: 4]
As a series of set pieces looking for any available fable to keep it afloat, 10,000 BC is really nothing more than computing power and implausibility.
When you see the name Roland Emmerich on a film’s credits, you expect a little cheese. After all, the cheddar-fied flavor of wildly uneven spectacles like Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Day After Tomorrow mandate such an evaluation. But no one can prepare you for the ungodly Gouda of 10,000 BC. An amalgamation of much better movies, riffing on offerings as diverse as Quest for Fire, Apocalypto, The Ten Commandments, and any number of creaky ancient myths, Emmerich has finally hit the Monterey Jack-pot. This is a film so completely devoid of creative invention that it entertains by rote, using CG-eye candy and narrative familiarity to barely get by.read full review…
Other Releases - In Brief
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day [rating: 6]
What do you get when you cross the stiff upper lip British perseverance of a pre-WWII London with the classic American screwball comedy? Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day might just be the answer. How two seemingly incongruous elements like the mannered and the madcap fit into the 2008 movie landscape is an issue that Indian filmmaker Bharat Nalluri handles quite well. He takes the tale of a prudish nanny (Frances McDormand) with a tendency toward unemployment, and finds a natural foil in a ditzy Yank actress (Amy Adams) juggling three different gentlemen. Together, the pair serpentines through social faux paxs, personal indiscretions, and soul-searching moments of the heart. Miss Pettigrew - as a persona and a film - is far from perfect. There’s a laid back quality to the narrative that really needs a breakneck pacing to stay potent. And Adams remains Hollywood’s go-to gal for unnatural perkiness. But Nalluri finds a halfway decent balance between his incompatible approaches, resulting in a likeable, if often lumbering, Golden Age piffle.
