How She Move

It's easy to spot a decent dance movie: it's the movie that's full of dancing. It might sound obvious - and that's because it is - but time and time and time again movie-makers forget that audiences have come to see dancing and not endless scenes where a bunch of grimly urban types sulk around letting us know that it's tough out there on the streets and the only way to survive is to do a bunch of choreographed dance movies with your homies. Which is a long way of saying that How She Move doesn't contain anywhere near enough scenes in which our heroine does, in fact, move.

Kicked out of private school because her parents spent all the tuition money on trying to keep her junkie sister alive - guess what, they failed - Raya (Rutina Wesley) returns home to the projects, where everyone hates her because that's how they roll. Eventually she makes some friends, only then they start hating her again, then they don't, then there's a big dance competition called Step Monster, and the movie Step Monster was a dozen times better than this movie and it didn't have any dancing in it at all. The problem is simple: nowhere near enough dancing, and way too many scenes dragging things down as characters hate on each other for reasons that seem more than a little blurry. Even the traditional "my parents don't understand that I need to dance!" subplot doesn't work here, mostly because the mum is so angry and negative that she'd hate anything her daughter wanted to do up to and including taking a bath. And if all that isn't reason enough to steer clear, the title's bad english. Avoid.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #423)

The Secret of the Grain

60-year old Slimane (Habib Boufares) is an Arab immigrant living in a small port town in the south of France. Having worked at the local shipyard for 30 years he’s devastated to be laid off. He devises a plan to open up a small business – a couscous restaurant on a renovated barge. The chef will be his cranky ex-wife Souad, while his gaggle of grown-up kids will help. But the real assistant is Slimane’s step-daughter Rym (a luminous Hafsia Herzi) whose brash confidence and tenderhearted intelligence cut through all the red tape of French bureaucracy.

Tunisian writer-director Abedellatif Kechiche (Games of Love and Chance) takes his time (148 mins) to paint a rich ethnographic portrait of this large and conflicted immigrant family. There are long meandering scenes encompassing food, arguments and seemingly trivial chat. (One entire scene is devoted to the cost of disposable nappies.) Yet it’s this detail that gives the film its almost documentary power, and subverts any tendencies towards the ‘opening up a restaurant’ movie clichés. Quietly building to a sudden desperate crescendo, the film’s conclusion makes new sense of everything that has gone before.

Rochelle Siemienowicz

Step Up 2 The Streets

We all know what to expect from dance movies: silly plots in which good looking dancers battle lame 'urban' problems about 'keeping it real' and 'staying true to the street' while also rebelling against stuffy teachers - said battles and rebellions taking the form of insanely complicated dance routines. And so what? Every genre has it's cliches, and the important thing is whether they're handled well - which surprisingly, Step Up 2 for the most part does. There's no denying that the story - in which our sexy sweat pants wearing heroine is given one last chance to go straight by enrolling in the Baltimore Institute for the Arts, only to find that her ghetto dance crew doesn't fit in with her new life and her new life doesn't like the way she moves - is pretty silly. But the typical multi-racial 'crew' she puts together to battle at 'the streets' (an underground dance contest) is even sillier, including a hunky jock, an Asian stereotype bordering on the offensive, an amazingly nerdy guy (who ends up scoring the hottest chick in school) and a bunch of back-up dancers. Which is a welcome sign that this isn't taking itself too seriously. The dancing is pretty good, the tone is light and fun, and if you're a fan of amazingly brilliant US crime series set in Baltimore The Wire, then this film's Baltimore setting is gold on it's own. If only gay stick-up artist Omar and his shotgun had made a cameo...

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #422)

Horton Hears a Who

Dr Suess has had a nightmare run at the cinema of late, and it's a sign of just how well-loved he is that ever after such cinematic stinkers as The Cat in the Hat and The Grinch Hollywood still thought they could lure audiences back into another film based on his work. But while both those films were live-action disasters, Horton is all-CGI, and whether it's the freedom that comes with not having to build a film around an actor in a costume or the desire to actually make a film that's more than a mish-mash of references and jokes, the result is a Suess film that - for once - is more Suess than suss. Horton (the voice of Jim Carrey, who played the Grinch in The Grinch) is a mildly erratic but kind-hearted elephant content to mess around in the jungle - until one day he hears a tiny voice coming from a even tinier speck as it drifts past. Anyone else would ignore it, but he tracks the speck down (cue plenty of surprisingly decent sight gags as an elephant rumbles through the jungle after a teeny-tiny speck) and discovers that the speck is in fact home to an entire world called Whoville, where the Mayor (the voice of Steve Carell) has things tough enough without learning that his entire world is just a tiny speck that could be destroyed at any moment. Horton's problem is getting the speck somewhere safe while the rest of the jungle's residents think his crazy talk about a tiny world is upsetting the balance of things; the Mayor has to persuade a city where nothing has ever gone wrong that there could be some very big trouble ahead. This is a great kids movie that won't bore grown-ups: both Horton and the Mayor's stories are equally interesting, the jokes are almost always funny, the serious moments aren't belaboured, and while the tone is a little uneven (in padding out Suess's short book liberties have been taken and they don't always fit) there's a lot more good than bad. It's not perfect - there's a final musical number that's just wrong - but for once a bit of Dr Suess' magic has made it onto the screen.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #422)

Drillbit Taylor

When three high school freshmen become the target of some particularly vicious bullies, they're forced to hire a bodyguard to help them make it through the day. Unfortunately, the bodyguard they hire is a homeless army deserter more interested in milking them for all their cash then bailing to Canada than taking on the bullies. It's not exactly the comedy set-up of the year - unless that year is 1983 - but Drillbit Taylor manages to not only avoid the stench of a lame 80's teen comedy but stand up as a funny film in it's own right thanks to a couple of winning factors. Firstly, the trio of victims - fat would-be white rapper Ryan (Troy Gentile), super-skinny glasses guy Wade (Nate Hartley) and creepy midget Emmit (David Dorfman) - are really nerdy. As in, actually real-life nerdy, not Hollywood 's idea of nerdy (which is still amazingly cool) nerdy. So it's easy to see why they're getting picked on, and as they're nice (and funny) guys, we feel their pain. We also feel their pain because the bullies are really, really nasty. As in, they'd kill you with their bare hands and laugh while doing it nasty. So hiring a bodyguard seems like a logical response. And then there's Owen Wilson as Drillbit, as charming and as funny as ever, making a fairly scuzzy character seem like a great guy you'd want to hang out with even when he's doing things wrong. He's even able to make Drillbit's inevitable change of heart seem like more than just the usual lame plot twist. In short, the many funny jokes are grounded in what feels like reality: if you've ever been bullied (and who hasn't), then you'll get a lot of laughs out of this one.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #422)

Be Kind Rewind

Most Hollywood movies based around a gimmick don't have anything else to recommend them: the problem with Be Kind Rewind is that it has so much going on around it's central idea that it gets swamped. So what really should be nothing more than a movie in which Jack Black and Mos Def make shoddy home-made versions of Hollywood blockbusters like Robocop and Ghostbusters - and seriously, that idea alone is more than enough to get people into a cinema - instead becomes in the hands of director Michel Gondry (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) a bloated salute to the power of imagination to bring a community together... through making dodgy versions of old Hollywood blockbusters. The set-up feels both rushed and drawn out, as if Gondry knew he had to explain what was going to happen but wasn't really interested in getting it right: Def works at the tatty video-only store owned by Danny Glover, while Black lives next door to a power station he thinks is warping his mind. And maybe he's right: he's crazy enough to get magnetised during a botched sabotage effort, and it's his magnetism that erases the store's tapes. So when Mia Farrow wants to rent Ghostbusters and threatens to report Def to Glover when he says he doesn't have it, they decide to make their own version. The idea takes off, and soon the whole neighbourhood is clamouring to see their versions of the old classics... because not only does no-one have a DVD player, they also don't have access to YouTube. We only get to see snippets of the fake movies, which is a massive shame as they're the best things in the film. Instead, we get plenty of crowd shots of the local community, because community's important and... well, exactly what this has to do with remaking old movies is never really made clear. And that's this films problem: so much of it is just thrown away (including the great main idea) that what's supposedly important might as well be thrown away too.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #422)

Bella

Jose and Nina work in a New York restaurant. He’s the chef and she’s a waitress. Together they walk out on their tyrannical boss. Over the course of the day they become friends, and catch the train out to a beachside suburb to have a big old Mexican feast with Jose’s parents. Along the way life-changing decisions are made.

Nina (Tammy Blanchard) is pregnant, you see. She’s got no money and she’s all alone in the big city. Jose (played by Mexican pop and TV star Eduardo Verastegui) can’t quite hide his good looks behind a shaggy beard, but there’s something tragic in his eyes. What is his terrible secret?

Winner of the People’s Choice Award at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival, Bella is a sweet, good-looking film with a gorgeous tinkly musical score and a pair of likeable leads. The script is undeveloped, tending towards soapy cliché. Still, the film paints a very pretty picture of melting-pot New York, complete with the colorful ‘ethnic’ family who cook spicy food together, say grace in Spanish, then drink and dance the night away. Overly familiar, yes, but still charming.

Rochelle Siemienowicz
(This review first appeared in The Big Issue, #298)