Episode 7: The Golden Compass, Close Encounters and the Seventh Seal
Ben Howard returns with this week's cinema and DVD releases. The festive movie season gets into full swing with the release of fantasy epic The Golden Compass; Justin Timberlake and The Rock star in oddball futuristic satire Southland Tales; Spielberg's all-time classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind celebrates its 30th anniversary and the late Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece The Seventh Seal returns to DVD in all its gloomy plague-ridden glory.
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Hello, I'm Ben Howard, here to guide you through this weeks film offerings from the world of cinema and DVD. On this week's show Nicole Kidman tries to not ruin another film, strange goings on in Mexico and Ingmar Bergman plays knight to king four with the Grim Reaper.
Tolkien, Potter, Narnia, Terabithia… it seems we can't move for CGI-laden adaptations of popular fantasy fiction at the moment. The latest addition to this list is The Golden Compass, a lavish adaptation of the first part of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.
This tale is set in an alternative 19th century Oxford, where a young girl called Lyra is taken in by the beautiful but sinister Miss Coulter, played by Nicole Kidman. Lyra escapes and sets off for the Arctic to find her explorer uncle Lord Asriel, accompanied by her shape-shifting animal assistant Pantalaimon.
For director Chris Weitz, this is a big step up from About a Boy and American Pie – there is no Badly Drawn Boy soundtrack or teenage pastry porking here. With nearly half of the whopping $180m budget spent on the effects, this is a CGI overload, especially since every character in this strange world seems to be accompanied by a quirky creature designed in an Apple Mac.
In fact, there are animals everywhere – the snow-bound climax features a spectacular armoured bear fight – while a cast that includes Daniel Craig, Ian McShane and Sam Elliott do their best to not be overshadowed by the techno wizardry. The story has been streamlined and the controversial anti-religion subtext of the novel played down, but for kids and adult fans of the book, this is the season's must-see blockbuster.
If I was to tell you that the second of this weekend's movie picks stars The Rock, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Seann William Scott, then you'd probably be expecting some kind of teen-friendly action comedy. Southland Tales is in fact director Richard Kelly's demented, much-delayed follow up to Donnie Darko that had critics booing like dyslexic cattle at last year's Cannes Film Festival and finally arrives in all its re-edited glory.
This sprawling satire is set in a near-future California, where oil supplies are scarce and a large ensemble cast pursue a variety of political goals.
While Donnie Darko was weird and complex but did ultimately make some sort of sense, Southland Tales is downright bewildering. Kelly doesn't help matters by dividing his film into the three sections and making them parts 4, 5 and 6 of a larger story – for those who care, the first three parts can be bought in comic book form – but in a world of safe, predictable American cinema there's something quite thrilling about an expensive, star-studded movie with so little interest in making mainstream audiences happy. It'll be fascinating to see what Kelly does next; just don't expect anyone to give him much money to do it with.
For many horror fans, hit Japanese chiller The Ring was a real breath of fresh air, but it was inevitably followed by dozens of increasingly less-scary imitators and rip-offs. Despite being a Mexican movie, KM31 has clearly been hugely influenced by Asian horror, but has enough of its own ideas to make it worth a look this weekend.
The title stands for Kilómetro 31, a supposedly cursed stretch of highway outside Mexico City. A young woman crashes her car while trying to avoid a spooky kid on the road and ends up in a coma. Her sister starts to investigate and slowly uncovers the terrible truth about the highway.
Strange noises from another realm, vengeful spectres trapped between life and death, creepy ghost girls with long dark hair – let's face it, we've all been here before. In fact, the latter are so ubiquitous in modern horror, you've got to wonder if these kids attend some sort of undead stage school to perfect their crawling and creaking. But this is nevertheless an effective shocker, beautifully shot, with some terrific special effects and decent number of scares. It might be an idea not to drive home from the cinema afterwards, however.
On to this week's DVD releases, and we've got a couple of bona fide classics getting the deluxe special edition treatment. First up is Steven Spielberg's 1977 sci-fi favourite Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Thirty years on, it still stands up as one of his finest movies – a perfect mix of psychological drama, gripping thriller and visual spectacle, as Richard Dreyfuss gets increasingly obsessed about the UFOs that have chosen to visit Earth.
There are no fewer than three versions of the movie in this collection, plus the usual collection of documentaries and interviews. The film looks and sounds amazing, and for those who've made the leap to high-def, there's a stunning Blu-ray edition also available. In fact, short of aliens providing us with cranial viewing implants, it's hard to imagine how this movie could ever look better.
And finally, it's happy 50th birthday to The Seventh Seal, one of the 20th century's greatest movies and the crowning achievement of the late Swedish master Ingmar Bergman. The scenes in which Max von Sydow's war-weary knight plays chess with the Grim Reaper to stall for time before being taken away has been spoofed many times over the years, but it's easy to forget how much power the rest of this movie holds.
The Seventh Seal is not a party movie, but it's less miserable than its reputation would have you believe. Sure, it's set in a country ravaged by the black plague, witch burnings and outbursts of random violence, but that's no worse than Croydon on a Saturday night, and there is definitely a blackly comic edge to proceedings.
Von Sydow's dignified performance adds real humanity, and let's face it, there is more intelligence in one frame of the movie than in Michael Bay’s entire filmography. This DVD release presents a gorgeous new print and some previously unseen behind-the-scenes footage.
Okay, that's it for this week, join me next week for more of the best film action on the market. Until then, enjoy the weekend.
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