Monica Bellucci

'Manual of Love 2' opens wide in Italy

LONDON — Local openers look set to dominate the box office in Italy and France this weekend while auds in Blighty are readying themselves for a knockout blow from "Rocky Balboa." Local laffer "Manual of Love 2" goes out on massive 710 screens in Italy. The latest offering from Aurelio De Laurentiis' Filmauro stable is the sequel to 2005 smash hit "Manual of Love," which did $3.9 million at 550 in its opening frame en route to a $16.7 million final cume. "Love 2" is rammed with local stars, including Monica Bellucci in a steamy wheelchair sex scene. The heavily-marketed sequel is expected to open on around $6.5 million, according to one plex chain topper. "Manual of Love 2" faces little in the way of competition from fellow openers but exhibs expect last week-end's strong openers "The Pursuit of Happyness" and "Rocky Balboa" to do solid soph sesh trade. Shrugging off underwhelming reviews from the French crix, home-rown new releases stormed the charts in Gaul, taking the top two spots on Wednesday, their opening day. Laurent Boutonnat's big-screen adaptation of French 1970s TV series "Jacquou le croquant" opened on 576 screens, raking in nearly $340,000 on opening day for distributor Pathe. Starring emerging thesp Gaspard Ulliel ("A Very Long Engagement") as a pickpocket in the early 19th century, one reviewer dissed Boutonnat's first feature film effort — clocking in at two hours and 25 minutes, and with a whopping $26 million budget — as "ugly, flavorless and tasteless." "Truands," helmed by Frederic Schoendoerffer, another relative newcomer to the big screen, raked in a respectable $174,345 at 196 on opening day for StudioCanal. Despite boasting local stars such as Benoit Magimel, Beatrice Dalle and French theater legend Philippe Cau-bere, crix have generally given the hyper-violent gangster film the thumbs down. Neil Burger's period melodrama "The Illusionist," which has already proved a hit in Spain, also opened well in France, netting Metropolitan Fil-mexport more than $132,700 on 179. French critics raved about the perfs of Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti. After ring-rocking first round performances in Italy and Spain last weekend, Fox's "Rocky Balboa" is gloved up for a similarly fast start in the U.K. Evergreen Hollywood heavyweight Sylvester Stallone touched down in Blighty to tub-thump for the pic. His visit to a soccer game gained massive media coverage. Bookers praise Fox's "vintage-looking, iconic" campaign and are looking for a $5 million bow. As in Italy and Spain, Brit crix have been surprisingly sweet on the sixth pic in the boxing sequel. Paramount releases "Babel" in Blighty on 120 screens and is looking for a decent debut of about $800,000, according to exhibs. Awareness has been high for the awards season contender since it closed the London Film Festival on Nov. 2. The Brad Pitt-starrer received a boost last Friday when it was nommed for seven BAFTAs. Reviews have been good to mixed. "This is a powerful and brilliantly made film. There are, however, moments when its pretensions get the better of it," wrote Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard. Paul Verhoeven's Dutch box office smash "Black Book" bows in Blighty and is boosted by very positive re-views. "No question, the director is back on form, and the blend of rollicking thrills, brutality and covert

compassion makes this his most vital movie since 'RoboCop'," said Tim Robey in the Daily Telegraph. Tartan Films releases the pic on 85 screens and tradesters predict a take north of $800,000. In Spain, the question perplexing industryites is whether newcomer "Apocalypto," distribbed by indie Aurum, has the necessary punch to knock "Rocky Balboa" into second spot in its soph sesh. Aurum has backed "Apocalypto" with a big marketing campaign and Gibson has a strong track record in Spain. "The Passion of Christ" cumed $15.2 million in the territory. But local bookers suggest the subtitles might hinder "Apocalypto's" progress. The Spanish press echoed Mexican press complaints that the film contains indirect racial slurs. "Storm winds against 'Apocalypto," ran an El Pais article Friday, quoting the Mayan writer Jorge Miguel Cocom Pech's opinion that the film "is pure rubbish." Complaints of racism could prove beneficial publicity. The highest profile local opener in Spain is "De profundis," an oceanscape toon pic based on thousands of hand-drawn paintings by Galician director Miguelanxo Prado. The pic could have arthouse appeal, based on its sheer singularity, said exhibbers. In Germany, Marcus H. Rosenmueller, who enjoyed a major sleeper hit last year with "Wer frueher stirbt, ist laenger tot," is back with another Bavarian laffer — "Schwere jungs." Local bookers expect the comedy-drama, about three Bavarian buddies and amateur bobsledders who qualify for the 1952 Winter Olympics, to bag a $1 million opening. Gabriele Muccino's "The Pursuit of Happyness," which has already bowed brightly in the U.K. and Italy, also looks set for a strong Teuton debut. Hopes are lower for Clint Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers," with bookers predicting the very American subject matter may make it a hard sell to Germans despite its strong reviews.

Jeffrey M. Anderson's 400 Screens, 400 Blows -Globe Gripes and Miramax Mucking

I'm just dying to complain a bit about the Golden Globes, so please indulge me for just a moment. Let's take a look at the winner for Best Dramatic Film, Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel (currently playing on 173 screens). Now, let's compare it with two other films directed by Iñárritu's pals, Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men and Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (194 screens). Being totally honest, hardly anyone would say that Babel is the best film of the three. It's long and vague and reeks of self-importance, and even some of our most overenthusiastic critics shrugged their shoulders at it. But of the three, it's the most awards-like. It has a message about guns, and one character has a medical condition (she's deaf), which almost always results in awards. Plus, it carefully straddles the line between confusing and complex, so that even viewers who didn't quite get the point were reluctant to say so for fear of looking dumb. (Last year's Syriana pulled off the same stunt.) On the other hand, Pan's Labyrinth and Children of Men employ genre elements in their story construction, namely horror and sci-fi, and nothing turns off awards-givers faster. Not that either film was dumb, not by a long shot. But their messages were cleverly woven into the story's fabric, instead of waved around like a flag. Such subtleties are often lost on the folks that hand out awards. This leads one to conclude, though many find the idea ludicrous or depressing, that filmmakers deliberately make films with certain elements in place to win awards. But what's really depressing is not so much that they do this, but that it works. Another gripe: as much as I admired it, I don't think it's right that Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima (35 screens) won Best Foreign Language Film, and that Mel Gibson's Apocalypto was nominated. Yes, they technically qualify, since they were filmed in foreign languages, but it's a question of fairness: shouldn't this category be reserved for those films and filmmakers without big Hollywood backing? Or for filmmakers whose first language is not English? (Not to mention that the horrible Apocalypto shouldn't have been nominated at all, for anything.) Still, the Globes did finally award Martin Scorsese a long-deserved award, Best Director for The Departed (117 screens). It's become a national joke that arguably our greatest filmmaker has never won the industry's highest award, so perhaps this will send a clue to the Oscars. And the composer Alexandre Desplat won for his superb score for The Painted Veil (202 screens). It's a score that stood out from the movie a bit, but it's also a score that I would actually like to listen to on its own. Desplat likewise composed my favorite score of 2004, for the criminally underrated Birth, as well as for Girl with the Pearl Earring (2003).

Anyway, moving on to a bit of good news this week: The Thai filmmaker Wisit Sasanatieng's 2000 film Tears of the Black Tiger (1 screen) was recently freed from Miramax purgatory. The film is something of a Western melodrama, with elements of Sergio Leone combined with Douglas Sirk; it has a relentlessly artificial surface with supercharged pastel coloring, operatic overacting and tearjerking moments so sappy that Hallmark would blush. It's beautifully filmed, but a little slow, given that all this emotional weight hinges on these two-dimensional characters.

As they did with so many other films, Miramax enthusiastically snapped up the rights, changed the film's ending, and then shelved it indefinitely. Now that Disney is in charge of Miramax's back catalog, some house cleaning has begun. Magnolia Pictures picked up Tears of the Black Tiger, restored the original ending, and released it in American theaters, seven years after the fact. (It's currently playing in New York and will be moving around to other cities through March.) Slowly, other films smothered or butchered by Miramax have been making their way out into the real world. Terry Zwigoff recently completed his director's cut of Bad Santa, without the additions the studio requested of him (no, it's not the cut known as "Badder Santa"; this is a brand new one. Look for the green DVD box.) And I tracked down a Region 0 DVD of the original cut of Giuseppe Tornatore's 2000 film Malèna, which has quite a bit more nudity and subsequently makes Monica Bellucci's title character darker and less passive. I also found an American-friendly DVD of Abbas Kiarostami's masterpiece Through the Olive Trees (1994), which Miramax briefly and tentatively released before shelving. And even Miramax itself got into the act when it released Stephen Chow's Shaolin Soccer on DVD in its superior original cut as well as the Miramax-edited and dubbed version. Of course, the real extent of the damage is unclear. It's possible that disappointments like Billy Bob Thornton's All the Pretty Horses (2000), Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York (2002) and Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm (2005) went under their knife. We know that Jim Jarmusch demanded and received final cut on Dead Man (1996) and subsequently suffered a dismal, underfunded and unpublicized distribution. But one wonders if a great film like Jane Campion's The Piano (1993) opened here with her final approval, or how Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994) might have been changed? Perhaps these new baby steps will result in more widespread reform, some new re-cuts and re-releases, and the cinema can breathe easy again.

The Last King Of Scotland | 14-01-2007 16:50

Forest Whitaker gives a sensational performance as Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in The Last King Of Scotland. So vividly charming and terrifying is he that I wished all the more that the movie had been about him. It's not however, it's the fictional tale of Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) a naive, Scottish medical school graduate who, through an accident of fate, ends up as Amin's personal physician.

I don't have a problem with the premise. It's a matter of record that Idi Amin had a great love of all things Scottish and that he was prone to make eccentric decisions. He might easily have appointed this young man his doctor. The problem I have with the film is that, rather than use its premise to explore the character of Amin and life under his rule in Uganda, The Last King Of Scotland is more interested in telling Garrigan's story, which follows the well-worn formula of the wide-eyed young man who's charmed by the devil - imagine Wall Street, transposed to 1970s Africa.

If you're not familiar with Amin, you'll learn very little about him from this movie, less than you would even from a glance at Wikipedia. I'd recommending looking that up before you go. Historical events flash by with only the briefest of explanations, from Amin's coup in 1970, through the expulsion of Uganda's Indian minority in 1972, to the hostage crisis when Palestinian hijackers landed an Air France jet at Entebbe Airport in 1976. The movie gets some of its facts wrong. Four of the Air France hostages were killed, not one as stated at the end.

Rather than take us behind the scenes of these events, which were headline news thirty years ago, the film merely uses them as a backdrop as we see Garrigan transformed from a rebellious young man who wants to leave home to an idealist practicing in the jungles of Uganda (there's a nice cameo from Gillian Anderson as a fellow doctor's wife) to the unwitting crony of a tyrant and finally to a man with his eyes opened, frightened and appalled at the company in which he finds himself. In the last half hour, the film becomes a thriller and it's over-directed to a pounding crescendo by Kevin Macdonald.

As the subject matter for a movie, this is nowhere near as fascinating as a straight biopic of Amin might have been. Still, it could have worked on its chosen level if Garrigan had been a compelling character. He's not, he's an idiot and a pretty obnoxious one. Or are we supposed to find his cockiness, his slurs against "the fucking English" and his sleeping with friends' wives appealingly cheeky?

His behaviour is so stupid, it's hard to take an interest in his fate. He's oblivious to what's going on around him for much too long. He fails to leave when he sees how dangerous the country is. He gets people killed. He agrees to do things no sane person would do. Then, late in the movie, long after he's learned what kind of a man Idi Amin is, he starts boning one of his wives. Seriously. If you can still sympathise with him after that, you have a greater tolerance for fools than I do.

It's not fair to blame James McAvoy for playing the character on the page. He comes off well in some of his scenes with Whitaker, particularly his last when Garrigan finally grows some balls and tells Amin what he thinks of him. It's just a shame that Whitaker's superb portrayal of the dictator, which is justifiably winning him award nominations, is a mere supporting character in the rite of passage of a complete prat.

Why did this film need to be about Garrigan, or any fictional, white westerner? Amin, like Robert Mugabe, was an African monster, whose supporters, enemies and victims were almost all black Africans. Twenty years after Richard Attenborough made Cry Freedom about Donald Woods instead of Steve Biko, why do movies about Africa still need to have white characters front and centre, preferably naive idealists needing to have their eyes opened to the horrors of the continent? With the honourable exception of Hotel Rwanda, this has been true of practically all recent mainstream films on the subject -there have been Bruce Willis and Monica Bellucci in Tears Of The Sun, Clive Owen and Angelina Jolie in Beyond Borders, Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman in The Interpreter, Ralph Fiennes in The Constant Gardener, Hugh Dancy and John Hurt in Shooting Dogs and, next up, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Connelly in Blood Diamond.

Is it racism? I doubt it. There are plenty of black stars now who could take the lead. Will Smith's as big as anyone on the screen. Is it that white liberal inclination to make issue movies about white liberals agonising about the issue rather than make them about the issue itself? Maybe. Or is it, most likely, the filmmakers' patronising belief that the white audience needs its hand held? That we need to see people looking and talking like us or we won't get involved? That we can empathise with Will Smith playing an American single dad but not an African?

Strange, last weekend I watched an action film set against a backdrop of Mayan culture, shot in the Mayan language with unknown American Indian actors. I'm talking of course about Apocalypto. It's one of the most accessible, mainstream films you could imagine: a visceral thriller that grabs you by the throat and never lets up. I watched it in a packed multiplex cinema and no one in the audience seemed put out that Tom Cruise wasn't in it.

Predictions 2007: A pundit's spectacular

A new year dawned this week — a blank slate ripe with promise and possibility. What will this new year bring we wonder. What will we make fun of and what will we hype? What will be a hit and what will flop horribly? Who will make a comeback and succeed, and whose comeback will prove he or she is officially over and out in the most humiliating way? We asked our favorite entertainment commentators on the Web (and one guy whose publicist just happened to email us that day) to give us their predictions for this wee baby of unknown personality and IQ we call "2007." "Blow our minds," we told the Web pundits, and some of them actually did.

Monica Bellucci 1 | Monica Bellucci 2

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