Werner Herzog is your go-to guy if you want a film about extraordinary madness. The German director's legendary partnership with Klaus Kinski yielded such wild and wonderful monuments to insanity as Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. Theirs would be the natural team for this tale of a cop run amok, but, Kinski having departed to that great padded cell in the sky, Herzog hooks up instead with Nicolas Cage. The result is a slickly amusing, facetious study in dementia that declares its weirdness loud and proud without straying anywhere close to the edge of its comfort zone.
film reviews
Adam Sweeting
The most exciting part of the screening of this absurd new blockbuster was an appearance by producer Jerry Bruckheimer for a pre-show pep talk. You may be familiar with his CV - Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, all the CSIs, Pirates of the Caribbean. Only a little guy, but so was Attila the Hun. He raved dutifully to a theatre-full of British hacks about the flick’s marvellous mostly-English cast (a lot of it having been shot at Pinewood) and schmoozed with its beaming director, Mike “Four Weddings” Newell.
I daresay Jerry (and indeed Pinewood Studios) hope that Prince of Persia will kick off another gigabucks franchise like Pirates of the Caribbean, to which end the casting of Jake Gyllenhaal as the hero Dastan, former cheeky street brat adopted by Persia’s benign King Sharaman (Ronald Pickup), could go a long way. Bearded, muscled-up and equipped with adorably floppy hair (he has plans to bleach it in order to play deceased grunge-rocker Kurt Cobain), Jake has cut loose from his usual quizzical moodiness to make a surprisingly effective action hero. They’ve made him put on a British accent, which he carries off to immeasurably greater effect than that old grouch Russell Crowe in Robin Hood.
The film is fundamentally daft, which is what you’d expect from a story built on the virtual foundations of a computer game about ancient Persia. I hesitate to judge whether that’s better or worse than being derived from a Disney World resort attraction, as Pirates of the Caribbean was. Surprisingly, however, the screenwriters have smuggled in a sliver of political metaphor. The plot kicks off when the Persians besiege the city of Alamut on the pretext that the Alamutians have been selling weapons to Persia’s enemies, but having captured the city, they can find no weapons of mass destruction or even minor annoyance. But somebody - no plot spoilers here - has an ulterior motive, referred to in the Sands of Time of the title. Within Alamut rests a mystical dagger, which, when filled with the appropriate magic sand, can send time hurtling into reverse. Clearly such a device could have empire-building potential, and someone badly wants to lay their hands on it. Messrs Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush, are you getting this loud and clear?
Dastan, having spearheaded the Persian attack on Alamut, is rewarded for his boldness by being framed for the murder of his father, and is forced to go on the run while he tries to flush out the real killer. Happily, he is joined on his travels by Alamut's Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton), who has inherited the job of the keeper of the Sands of Time. She persuades him they must find the Secret Guardian Temple, and inevitably they must overcome many alarming supernatural hurdles en route. Ghastly assassins try to impale them with lethal metal prongs, and they need all their ingenuity to fend off hideous giant snakes which creep up on them by burrowing through the sand. Gyllenhaal gets to show off his free-running technique, only slightly computer-assisted, as he runs up walls and over buildings during lavish combat set pieces.
The allure of Arterton remains obscure, as she plays the princess like a bossy big sister and barely gets any of her kit off. I suppose you could say she's almost as good an actress as Elizabeth Hurley. There's much better value from Alfred Molina, tasked with the loveable-rogue role of Sheik Amar who runs a lucrative ostrich-racing racket, while Ben Kingsley is all silky smirkingness as Nizam, King Sharaman's allegedly loyal brother (pictured above).
Maybe it's OK if you switch off your brain, take the kids and get stuck into a big bucket of popcorn. The desert shots in Morocco look nice. Marks out of 10? Don't tempt me.
OVERLEAF: GEMMA ARTERTON ON STAGE AND SCREEN
Thomas H. Green
One of the hottest tickets at this year's Brighton festival is Godfrey Reggio's 1983 film Koyaanisqatsi accompanied by live soundtrack performance from the Philip Glass Ensemble. Sold out for weeks beforehand, there are touts outside but most of the middle-aged Bohemian audience seem to have bought their tickets well in advance. The reason it's such a draw is that Koyaanisqatsi is a cult whose enthusiasts are multifarious.
fisun.guner
When Rembrandt painted his 1642 masterpiece The Night Watch, he must have expected to live out his days in the style befitting a great artist. Yet he was soon to face financial ruin.
sheila.johnston
A field of sunflowers hang their heads, as though in shame or sorrow, to the deep thrum of a single chord in the film's opening shot, at once beautiful and threatening. But that is about the only breath of fresh air in the whole of the movie. Set on the first day of the 1982 Lebanon War, it proceeds for the rest of its duration to trap us, along with four terrified young Israeli soldiers, inside the confines of their tank, a monstrous apparition fetid with stale cigarette smoke, sweat and blood and a fifth character in its own right.
alexandra.coghlan
"Change" has been the watchword of the past few months, the standard flown hopefully aloft by every political party. A week spent anxiously waiting for a political conclusion, worrying about its impact, and heatedly debating its validity has made for a more than usually vulnerable sense of British nationhood: an apt time indeed for the UK release of Triomf, a brutal South African parable about political prejudice, social intolerance, and above all the fear of the new.
william.ward
Applauded by the audiences at Cannes last year, where it was the only Italian film in the competition, and nominated for a Palme d’Or, awarded four prizes at the Chicago International Film Festival, and favourably received at home, Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere is now being released in the UK, increasingly a rare event for films of Italian origin.
sheila.johnston
There's a fabulous movie about Robin Hood opening today. Step forward Gianluigi Toccafondo, whose luminescent five-minute Rotoscope animated version of the myth is an impressionistic, utterly original blender-mix of Chagall, Bacon and Munch. The only snag is that, to catch it, you do first have to sit through a 140-minute live-action curtain-raiser, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russell Crowe - an Oscar-winning actor who's here as wooden and broad in the beam as a Sherwood oak.
Veronica Lee
If I had a fiver for every time I have heard a comic described (usually by the comic himself) as “the new Bill Hicks”, I would be rather comfortably off. It’s tosh, of course, and, as his brother astutely says in American: The Bill Hicks Story, only Bill Hicks could be Bill Hicks, because what you saw on the outside was what was on the inside. Hicks himself is in no position to argue either way: he died, aged 32, from pancreatic cancer in 1994. Those who die at the height of their powers are usually conferred icon status; some deserve it; many do not. On balance, Hicks almost certainly does, as this very fine biopic by Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas shows.
josh.spero
In my parents’ day, apparently, one just turned up at the cinema whenever one felt like it, even if that meant the first thing you heard on entering the auditorium was Bogart signalling the start of a beautiful friendship. That doesn’t wash these days – the auteur put paid to that – and given the short films commissioned by ICO/LUX to run before the feature, we can only approve.