Movie Review: Laurel Canyon (2002)

Genre: Drama  

Director: Lisa Cholodenko  
Starring: Frances McDormand, Christian Bale, Kate Beckinsale, Alessandro Nivola, Natascha McElhone  
Running Time: 101 minutes  

Synopsis: Engaged couple Sam and Alex (Christian Bale and Kate Beckinsale) move to Los Angeles, where he is about to start a hospital residency while she completes a medical dissertation. Sam's mother Jane (Frances McDormand) is a music producer, and the couple expect to initially stay at her empty house. But they are surprised to find Jane still at the house, working with a music band featuring her newest lover Ian (Alessandro Nivola). Sam and his mother do not get along, but Alex is gradually drawn into Jane's world of pot and music, and Ian quickly makes advances on Alex. Meanwhile, Sam finds his new co-worker Sara (Natascha McElhone) tempting.

What Works Well: Director and writer Lisa Cholodenko creates a disparate set of characters, and allows the worlds of art and science to rub against each other as a social experiment. Despite the languid pace and meandering plot points, watching Sam and Alex succumb to temptations carries a train-wreck-in-slow motion appeal. Frances McDormand's performance is a complex knot of nonchalant confidence and deep-seated regrets.

What Does Not Work As Well: Sam's apple-really-does-fall-close-to-the-tree journey is always forced, while the ease with which Alex ditches both her romantic anchor and her academic work is jarring. With everyone either already in the clutches of hormone-dominated life choices or well on that path, no astute characters are left to care for. The emotional outcome is unsurprisingly hollow, not helped by resolutions that happily merge inconsistencies with vagaries.

Key Quotes:

Jane: Are we ever gonna have a relationship?

Sam: Here we are - having it.

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Movie Review: The Trials Of Cate McCall (2013)

Genre: Legal Drama  

Director: Karen Moncrieff  

Starring: Kate Beckinsale, Nick Nolte, James Cromwell  

Running Time: 89 minutes  

Synopsis: Lawyer Cate McCall (Kate Beckinsale) is on probation due to an alcoholism problem. Despite support from her Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor Bridges (Nick Nolte), she only has limited visitation rights to see her daughter. As part of her probation Cate is assigned a pro bono case to appeal the murder conviction of Lacey Stubbs (Anna Schafer), and finds enough irregularities in the initial trial proceedings to cast doubt about Lacey's guilt in the mind of Judge Sumpter (James Cromwell). But Cate's apparent moment of triumph is just a gateway for a new set of unexpected problems.

What Works Well: Writer and director Karen Moncrieff confidently wades into the tumultuous life of a bright but flawed protagonist refusing to do anything the easy way. Cate's past and present have merged into one large mess, and Lacey Stubbs' convoluted murder charges add complexity well beyond most cinematic court cases. Kate Beckinsale powers through the ups and downs of the central role with aplomb, ably supported by a grizzled Nick Nolte deploying a lifetime of questionable wisdom.

What Does Not Work As Well: For the 89 minutes of running time, too much is going on. A prior wrongful conviction case hovers over Cate's psyche but receives sketchy treatment, while the Lacey Stubbs case falls victim to plenty of telling but no showing. The final act unsurprisingly unravels, the rush to satisfying resolutions trampling all over important procedural explanations.

Conclusion: A mixed verdict due to ambitious but excessive plotting.



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Movie Review: Whiteout (2009)

A crime thriller, Whiteout enjoys a chilly setting but is hampered by an elemental plot and pedestrian execution.

In a prologue set in 1957, a Soviet military cargo plane crashes during a flight over Antarctica after a violent shootout between the co-pilot and armed guards. Everyone on-board is killed.

In the present, Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsale) is a US Marshal responsible for security at a South Pole scientific research base. Along with doctor John Fury (Tom Skerritt), she starts to investigate when the dead body of a geologist is spotted on the open ice by pilot Delfy (Columbus Short). Carrie learns the victim was murdered and dropped from a plane, and two other geologists are missing and on the run. 

UN investigator Robert Pryce (Gabriel Macht) arrives unexpectedly to help, but Carrie is not sure she can trust him. She has to evade a mysterious axe-wielding assailant, and the body count mounts. Carrie finds evidence the geologists discovered the Soviet plane under the ice, the precious cargo triggering greed and murder. With a massive storm moving in and the base being evacuated for the winter, Carrie has limited time to identify the conspirators.

Whiteout boasts an inhospitable locale where the mere act of outdoor survival for just a few minutes can be an arduous challenge. Director Dominic Sena leverages nature's dangerous magnificence with frequent excursions outside the confines of the research base. Whether the characters are on the open ice or battling fearsome storms, the perils of Antarctica are always evident.

Unfortunately, everything else here is routine in the extreme. Four authors are credited with collaborating on the script, and the outcome is still a letdown. Carrie's tired backstory consists of routine emotional trauma prompting her to seek the most remote job assignment on the planet. The MacGuffin secret cargo at the root of the mystery has the lamest of revelations. And all the madman-with-an-axe horror moments - and these are plenty and lengthy - are straight out of teen slasher flicks, and edited into a jerky dark mess.

Kate Beckinsale brings a winning attitude and does her best to power through the material, but she is also unnecessarily subjected to a superfluous shower scene. Tom Skerritt adds welcome veteran heft to the cast. 

Whiteout does pack potential, but it's quickly iced.



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Movie Review: Click (2006)

A social fantasy comedy with lessons about life, Click provides passable humour and some genuine warmth despite the predictable message fare.

Michael Newman (Adam Sandler) is an architect working hard to impress his insufferable boss John Ammer (David Hasselhoff), but at the expense of neglecting his wife Donna (Kate Beckinsale) and two kids Ben and Samantha. Michael also has little time for his parents Theodore and Trudy (Henry Winkler and Julie Kavner), and believes all his hard work will pay off when he is promoted to partner, but in the meantime life is passing him by.

Michael goes shopping for a universal remote control, and eccentric salesperson Morty (Christopher Walken) gives him a brand new unit for free, on the condition that it cannot be returned. Michael discovers that with this remote control he can mute and pause those around him, and fast forward through tedious parts of his life including chores and arguments, jumping ahead to trouble-free and pain-free moments of success. But soon the remote control starts acting on its own based on memorizing Michael's previous wishes, and he loses control of his life.

Mixing familiar elements from movies as diverse as It's A Wonderful Life, Groundhog Day and The Family Man, Click is unambiguous about pushing the message of life as a journey, not a destination. By the standards of Adam Sandler, this is a reasonably controlled and well-packaged effort, mixing his trademark juvenile bathroom humour with plenty of moments lamenting the personal fallout from the single-minded drive to achieve perceived career success.

Beyond the family-first mantra, the film's other theme is simple but also eternal: personal and professional life is a mix of good and bad, and there is no joy to be had in moments of triumph without the effort to get there.

For all the message-heavy emphasis, the crassness demanded by Sandler's fans is still here: director Frank Coraci delivers a succession of dogs dry-humping a large stuffed toy throughout the film. Farts in the face stand proudly alongside kicks in the nuts and pull-down-the-trousers antics to satisfy the child brains in the audience.

But proving again that when surrounded by enough talent on both sides of the camera Sandler can do better, Click also seeks out tender moments of reflection and sorrowful hindsight between fathers and sons. It's not subtle and the performances err on the obnoxious side (Walken and Hasselhoff the prime culprits), but Michael's fantastical adventure with the magical remote control has its heart in the right place.

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Movie Review: Contraband (2012)

An complicated crime thriller, Contraband is murky, muddled and mindless.

In New Orleans, Chris Farraday (Mark Wahlberg) is a retired smuggler, now happily married to Kate (Kate Beckinsale) and the father of two kids. Kate's younger brother Andy (Caleb Landry Jones) is caught up in a customs raid and has to ditch a cargo of drugs overboard, infuriating gangster Tim Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi), who paid $700,000 for the shipment. Chris and his friend Danny (Lukas Haas) go back into business for one final run to make enough money to pay off Briggs, leaving Kate and the kids in the care of Chris' good friend and former partner-in-crime Sebastian (Ben Foster).

Chris, Danny and Andy board the cargo ship of Captain Redmond Camp (J.K. Simmons) and arrange to pick up high quality counterfeit bills during a stop in Panama City. Once there, they tangle with the heavily armed gang of local criminal Gonzalo (Diego Luna), who is planning his own heist of expensive artwork. Nothing goes according to plan, as Captain Camp becomes suspicious and Briggs sets his sights on terrorizing Kate.

Directed by Baltasar Kormákur and an adaptation of an Icelandic film, Contraband is overstuffed with secondary characters, jumps around to numerous side-quests, and stretches credibility well past the snapping point. The tried and tested "one more job" cliche is fine if deployed correctly, but here the job becomes a convoluted make-it-up-on-the-fly mess of shifting objectives and multiple double-crosses among a bunch of crooks, none of them likeable enough to matter.

The action scenes are shoehorned into the film for the sake of injecting gratuitous energy boosts. A bloody hold-up of an armoured truck in Panama City leaves multiple fatalities strewn across the road but seemingly no ill-effects or consequences for Chris and his buddies. Earlier, Captain Camp's massive cargo ship slams into the docks, with several containers toppling to shore, all as part of an engine sabotage plot to gain Chris some on-shore time. The investigation of the crash starts and ends with one customs official waving her arms about.

Meanwhile the film's entire premise is undermined and suspect: Chris appears easily capable of physically and emotionally intimidating bad guy Briggs whenever he chooses to, calling into question the entire reason why Chris re-enters the life of crime to save Andy's hide.

Despite some shadings of style and no shortage of talent in the cast, Contraband is overplotted and underwhelming.

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Movie Review: Love And Friendship (2016)

An adaptation of Jane Austen's novel Lady Susan, Love And Friendship rattles off long passages of dialogue in a series of confined settings as the protagonist tries to steer her life towards comfortable money. The film is static, stagey and unconvincing.

England, in the 1790s. Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) is widowed and penniless. She is also conniving and desperate to find monied husbands for herself and her daughter Frederica (Morfydd Clark). Susan, whose one friend is transplanted American Alicia Johnson (Chloë Sevigny), sets about winning the heart of her sister-in-law's younger brother Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel), while trying to convince Frederica to accept the wedding proposal of the rich but stupid Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett). The real prize, however, is the wealthy and powerful Mr. Manwaring, but he is already married to the increasingly frantic Lucy (Jenn Murray).

Directed and written by Whit Stillman, Love And Friendship gets bogged down with too many stuffy characters who have little to do except be victimized by Lady Susan's sharp wit. The film's comedy stems from the inherent, and sometimes explicit, stupidity of everyone except Susan, and once the pattern is set, the film sinks into a predictable downward spiral of Susan moving the chess pieces to checkmate all around her.

Some of the dialogue exchanges are witty, there are a few laughs, the costumes and hairstyles are lavish and Beckinsale radiates confidence. But the material is extremely thin, the various settings in London and the countryside estates are excuses to continue the same conversations within different indoor sets, and too often the scenes resemble readings of Austen's prose rather than acting. The film fundamentally fails to shift from a clever book to an engaging visual experience.

When it comes to Lady Susan, Love And Friendship are irrelevant; instead, her world is all about convenience and manipulation, and unfortunately her gamesmanship is also a crushing bore.

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The Movies Of Kate Beckinsale

All movies starring Kate Beckinsale and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

The Last Days Of Disco (1998)

Pearl Harbor (2001)

Serendipity (2001)

Laurel Canyon (2002)

The Aviator (2004)

Click (2006)

Whiteout (2009)

Contraband (2012)

Total Recall (2012)

The Trials Of Cate McCall (2013)

Love And Friendship (2016)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Serendipity (2001)

A sweet romance, Serendipity fully commits to a single premise and makes the most of it. John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale find excellent chemistry and are extremely appealing as star-struck would-be lovers, their future guided by the quirky side of fate.

In New York City at Christmas time, Jonathan (Cusack) and Sara (Beckinsale) reach for the same pair of gloves at a department store. Although she has a boyfriend and he has a girlfriend, they are instantly smitten with each other and spend a few hours together, including sharing desert at an ice cream bar called Serendipity, and ice skating under the stars at Central Park. The magical evening is ruined by a devilish kid pushing all the elevator buttons at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, and the couple are separated. Jonathan only knows Sara's first name, and is unable to locate her.

Years later, Jonathan is engaged to Halley (Bridget Moynahan) and Sara has relocated to San Francisco and is engaged to musician Lars (John Corbett). But both are suddenly unsure of their chosen partners, and small clues prompt them to start looking for each other again. Jonathan recruits his best friend Dean (Jeremy Piven), a New York Times obituary writer, for a final quest to track down Sara, while Sara tricks her best friend Eve (Molly Shannon) to join on her on a trip to New York. With Jonathan and Halley's wedding day fast approaching, it's a race against time for the separated lovers to try and find each other again.

Directed by Peter Chelsom as a piece of whimsy with a dash of humour sprinkled on destiny's mischievousness, Serendipity announces its intentions in the title and never wavers from playing with the theme of fate dropping little hints at all the forks in the road of life. With the final outcome never in doubt, the film is playfully built on the little coincidences and seemingly random happenstances that may be harmless trivia or a grand indication of what decision is next needed.

An old Paul Newman film poster, a signed book given as a gift, an engagement ring that doesn't quite fit, a store receipt found inside a glove years after the purchase, a signed five dollar bill, a storefront converted to a bridal shop: little events could just be little events, or life-altering signposts urging a dramatic change in direction. The Marc Klein script cleverly keeps Jonathan and Sara in charge of all that they do in life. Fate is not imposed on them, but rather it provides them with what they need to reach their destination, or not, depending on how they interpret the available clues.

The lovers spend most of the film apart, an often troublesome plot device. And the two central characters are barely rounded, with their occupations and lives outside the romance context barely probed. But John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale overcome the separation with dedicated performances that convey genuine longing and a profound belief that the few hours Jonathan and Sara spent together were an introduction to something much more meaningful.

In support, Jeremy Piven and Molly Shannon do well to fill the void, providing Cusack and Beckinsale with foils to play against. Eugene Levy lets loose as a hilariously annoying store clerk who is both infuriating and helpful as Jonathan desperately tries to track down Sara.

New York City at Christmas time and a soundtrack of romantic songs add to the film's charm. Serendipity never threatens to tax the intellect, but it does brighten up the heart with a satisfyingly warm glow.

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Movie Review: Pearl Harbor (2001)

A romantic love triangle set before, during and after the Japanese attack, Pearl Harbor features a sensational 40 minute recreation of the raid, but is otherwise weighed down by clunky writing and listless performances.

Tennessee boyhood friends and lifelong aspiring pilots Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett) enlist together and join the air command of Major Doolittle (Alec Baldwin). During the recruitment process Rafe meets and falls in love with nurse Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale). With the United States not yet involved in World War Two, Rafe is granted a transfer to the Eagle Squadron of American pilots fighting in the Battle Of Britain, while Danny and Evelyn are stationed at Pearl Harbor.

Rafe proves himself to be an ace pilot, but his plane is lost during a dogfight and he is assumed killed in action. Gradually the grieving Danny and Evelyn get close, and after a few months they fall in love. In the meantime, the imperialistic Japanese government is negotiating peace with the United States while secretly plotting a devastating blow to the US Pacific fleet. Rafe, who had survived his crash and was sheltered by the resistance in France, returns to Pearl Harbor only to find his best buddy and girlfriend now in a full-fledged relationship, on the eve of the audacious Japanese attack.

With Titanic proving that famous real-life disasters can be recast as grand fictional romances and achieve great box office success, Pearl Harbor uses history as rough background for a three-hour romance. Pearl Harbor aims more for the dreamy universe of From Here To Eternity than the technical reality of Tora! Tora! Tora!. It's a reasonable effort, eschewing historical accuracy for fictional characters caught in the crosshairs of extraordinary events.

But when the emphasis is supposed to be on tenderness and people rather than action and machines, Michael Bay is likely the most wrong director to be at the helm. Bay is much more comfortable with exploding hardware than exploring human emotions. The romance elements never add up to any level of convicing passion, with neither the Randall Wallace script nor Bay's directing able to create memorable moments or sufficient chemistry between the three leads.

The casting choices don't help. Affleck carries a smugness that helps him in the cockpit but oozes insincerity in the romantic scenes, while the stiff Josh Hartnett labours mightily but to no effect trying to prove that he can actually act. Kate Beckinsale is the best of the three and could have smoldered, but she never finds the required masculine reciprocity from neither Affleck nor Hartnett to catch fire.

Wallace also packs in too much into the story. Before the attack on Pearl Harbor there is a side trip with Rafe to the Battle Of Britain, and after the attack Rafe and Danny participate in the training and execution of the Doolittle raid. Compared to the elaborate treatment of the central attack, the other two military sub-stories are rushed, underdeveloped and ultimately unnecessary.

Despite the mammoth running length, none of the supporting cast are given enough to do, and the likes of Jon Voight (President Roosevelt), Baldwin (Doolittle), Sizemore (as a soldier stationed at a small airfield who helps rustle up a modicum of resistance during the attack) and Gooding Jr. (as real-life hero Petty Officer Miller) are reduced to symbolic snippets. The Japanese commanders planning the attack never progress beyond grim faced men spouting stock lines.

This leaves the film with its centrepiece to celebrate, and its a masterpiece of battlefield recreation. Bay comes into his own, filling the sky with Japanese Zeros, the ground with thundering explosions and blazing fires, and the sea with large battleships being pummeled and with drowning, desperate men. It's a stunning sequence deserving of full praise, Bay capturing the fury, chaos and brutality of the "date which will live in infamy". Ironically, a film that attempted to emphasize romance at the expense of hardware is almost saved by the roar of battle squashing the intended sweetness of convoluted love.

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Movie Review: The Aviator (2004)

The biography of Howard Hughes as he carves his legend in the worlds of film, flight, and business, The Aviator is the grand story of one rich but flawed man's visionary approach to life. Leonardo DiCaprio's performance is inspired, and Martin Scorsese directs with controlled audacity.

After a brief introductory glimpse of Hughes as a young boy being bathed by his mother as she emphasizes disease phobias, the film starts in 1927 with Hughes (DiCaprio) in his early twenties having inherited his family's immense fortune and control of the Houston-based Hughes Tool Company. But Hughes is not interested in running a tool company, and has settled in California to produce and direct the movie Hell's Angels about aviators in the Great War. Hughes hires Noah Dietrich (John C. Reilly) as his right hand man, and spares no cost to create an epic and ultimately successful film outside the studio system. Hughes also meets and starts a relationship with Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett).

Hughes translates his love of aviation into an aircraft manufacturing business and pours his resources to push innovations that make planes lighter and faster. He puts himself at risk by insisting on flying prototypes and attempting to set speed records, and is awarded contracts by the US Air Force and fledgling civilian company TWA. But Hughes is also suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and gradually his behaviour becomes more erratic. He breaks up with Hepburn and soon befriends another star in Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale). With the eruption of World War Two Hughes becomes a major contractor to the defence industry, and starts to develop the Hercules, a gigantic "flying boat" military transport airplane, an ambitious project that consumes inordinate time and resources.

After the war he takes control of TWA and unveils plans to start providing civilian flights across the Atlantic, which puts him in direct competition with Pan American Airways and its powerful chairman Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin). Trippe is well connected politically and calls on his friend Senator Owen Brewster (Alan Alda) to block TWA and to eventually start an intimidation campaign against Hughes. With his mental state worsening, Hughes faces the ultimate political battle to save his business and his legacy.

Despite a length of 170 minutes, The Aviator is a joy to watch and an unconditionally engrossing experience. Martin Scorsese directs John Logan's script with an eye firmly on the man at the centre of the legend, and creates a portrait of a flawed genius carving his own path, creating his own rules, and reshaping history. The Aviator portrays Hughes as a true one of a kind, a headstrong tycoon innovator possessing the courage of his convictions, always willing to create and fund a new reality whenever useless constraints get in the way of his achievements.

But he is also sick and undiagnosed, and DiCaprio is at his best as Hughes starts to lose the grip on his mind and his ability to practically function. Hughes' fear of germs consumes his life, and his increasingly damaged mind starts to freeze into endless sentence loops, behaviour that compromises Hughes' ability to lead and inspire. There is a thin line between genius and debilitation, and Hughes often crosses into the dark territory of an outstanding intellect misfiring badly. DiCaprio takes Hughes to the highest peaks of achievement and the lowest depths of self-imposed isolation in a driven performance deservedly nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award.

The Aviator is filled with moments that count as supreme brilliance, extreme folly and plain obsession all at once. Hughes micromanages Hell's Angels, hiring a meteorologist to predict the cloud formations that Hughes demands as the perfect backdrop to the aerial combat scenes. He then shoots endless reels and oversees a mammoth editing process, but the end result is a masterpiece. Hughes' fight with Trippe and Pan American is Quixotic, one man tilting at the windmills of an establishment backed by impressive political forces. And Hughes' tenacity in the face of all the technical impossibilities of the Hercules sums up his ever-strengthening resolve in the face of a seemingly never ending list of challenges. The Aviator is a study of the science of making the impossible possible, granted through a man with the resources to buy his way towards new solutions.

Scorsese eschews CGA and uses scale models to recreate the world of Hughes' aircrafts, from World War One fighters to military spy planes and finally the mammoth Spruce Goose, as the Hercules became known. The use of models gives the film a rich, old fashioned texture, and avoids the distraction created by the inevitable transition between real and digital screen images.

The rich supporting cast is full of first class talent, and Cate Blanchett won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her turn as Katharine Hepburn. Blanchett initially plays Hepburn as Hughes' female equivalent, an independent woman changing the rules of her industry, but a fateful trip to her family home in New England is telling: Hughes does nothing to try and fit in, and instead exposes the hypocrisy of rich people touting socialism as a viable political solution. Hepburn, for all her public independence, blends in with her family. Their relationship is never the same again.

In one of her best career roles, Kate Beckinsale also does an excellent job as Ava Gardner, as strong as Hepburn in dealing with her man but with fewer outward revolutionary airs. Gardner plays a crucial role in bringing Hughes back to his feet when he most needs a boost. Alec Baldwin and Alan Alda create a formidable duo in opposition to Hughes, the embodiment of industrial / political entangled sleaze corrupting the system. Jude Law and Willem Dafoe have small but sharp single scene roles, Law as Errol Flynn and Dafoe as a journalist possessing compromising photos of Hepburn with her new lover Spencer Tracy.

A magical union between talented filmmakers and an outstanding subject, The Aviator simply soars.

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Movie Review: Total Recall (2012)

A remake of the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger film and based on the 1966 Philip K. Dick short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale", the 2012 version of Total Recall is wholly unnecessary. Director Len Wiseman gets trapped into an endless succession of tiresome chases powered by computer generated imagery, resulting in byte-overload and a shamefully narrative-poor experience.

In a grim post-apocalyptic future, there are only two inhabitable territories on the globe. The United Federation of Britain comprises the former western Europe and holds the political power. The Colony (what used to be known as Australia) is where the poor and the labourers live. The two are connected by a high speed commuter shuttle system known as The Fall, which uses a tunnel drilled through the earth's core. Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell) lives in the Colony with his wife Lori (Kate Beckinsale) and works in the UFB. Unsatisfied with his life, Quaid suffers from nightmares where he is part of an anti-UFB resistance movement.

Quaid approaches the Rekall agency, which embeds fake memories for the enjoyment of those who cannot afford real escapist vacations. Upon choosing to create a memory where he is a dangerous double-agent, Quaid's real identity is triggered: he is indeed a revolutionary, and teams up with fellow-rebel Melina (Jessica Biel) to fight for the cause of resistance leader Matthias Lair (Bill Nighy), with the intention of toppling the evil UFB Chancellor Vilos Cohaagen (Bryan Cranston).

Farrell, Beckinsale (Mrs. Wiseman) and Biel do little other than look grim and chase each other through the storm of computer generated pixels. The script by Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback offers no wit or panache, with the characters taking a distant back seat to the CPUs. Wiseman, who's main claim to fame is the Underworld series, makes sure that the sets look great, but forgets to issue any commands to his actors beyond run, jump, grimace.

Total Recall quickly degenerates into a series of highly kinetic chase scenes, an impressive array of servers deployed to create virtual mazes for Quaid to race his way towards a jumbled objective. Pretty soon, the reasons for the running around are forgotten, and the brief pauses to move the story along or provide depth to the characters are treated with impatient disdain. The mindless action becomes an end unto itself, and all intellectual engagement is jettisoned into that tunnel through the earth's core.

The movie finally drives itself to depths of absurdity, the character of Lori effectively discarding her entire mission for the sake of justifying the ridiculous pursuit of Quaid with lethal force, and just when the script could not possibly become any more farcical, Chancellor Vilos personally leads an army of tin-pot robots intent on conquering The Colony by travelling with all the mechanized soldiers on the same shuttle system used by commuters. A politician leading an attacking army and using a glorified bus for transportation into battle? The 2012 version of Total Recall is just total imbecility.

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Movie Review: The Last Days Of Disco (1998)

A confused look back at the New York club scene in the dying days of disco music, The Last Days Of Disco is an attempt at glossy art that is patchy at best, inhabited by self-indulgent characters keen to demonstrate a faux intellectualism while partying and snorting themselves to waste.

The thin story line centres around Alice (Chloe Sevigny) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale), two lowly book readers trying to get a promotion to Associate Editors at a New York publishing house. Alice and Charlotte are not exactly friends, and in fact Charlotte dominates an asymmetrical relationship, but they move into an apartment together. They have fun by regularly going to a disco and hanging out with colleagues and friends from college days.

The men in the movie are plenty, and with quantity comprehensively trumping quality they are utterly lacking in presence and charisma. Des is a womanizer with a healthy drug habit who pretends to be gay when he wants to dump girlfriends. Jimmy is in marketing and is not welcome at the club but always anyway finds a way to gain entry. Tom is a lawyer who has a one night stand with Alice and infects her with sexually transmitted diseases (plural). Josh is with the District Attorney's office, a manic depressive on assignment with a unit investigating tax evasion at the club. Dan is a co-worker with Alice and Charlotte, critical of their lifestyle but nevertheless spending an unhealthy amount of time with them. Bernie is the uncompromising owner of the club. Van works at the club mostly doing Bernie's dirty work. None of them establish any momentum as characters that we could care less about.

Writer and director Whit Stillman is celebrated in some circles, but the The Last Days Of Disco is as interesting as watching a disco ball. Captivating for a few minutes, the experience quickly becomes repetitive, rotational and yes, childish. All that needs to be said about the film's attempt at appearing cerebral is that one of the main conversations centres around the motivations of the characters in Disney's Lady And The Tramp. The Last Days Of Disco is the worst kind of vapid: boredom that is not self-aware.

The film is full of supposedly educated male characters obsessed with entering the right clubs, engaging in tax evasion, snorting coke and passing on sexually transmitted diseases. Yes, the disco era may have been all about that for those sucked into the lifestyle, but The Last Days Of Disco's attempt to cloak the culture with wordy discourse is either failed irony or just a plain fail. It's better, if more painful, to face the facts that chasing the good times on the disco floor on a nightly basis and snorting white powder were somewhat incompatible with the basic intelligence required to achieve success.

Despite the poor material, the two female leads shine, and along with the soundtrack of non-stop disco standards almost succeed in making the movie watchable. Chloe Sevigny acts with head tilts, eye angles and a sceptical mouth; her Alice is unconventionally attractive as an insecure wannabe book editor, easily influenced by her friends. Kate Beckinsale as Charlotte is more familiar and more bewitching as a self-confident, overbearing source of unsolicited advice delivered with utter coquettishness, quick to victimize Alice with a pile of amateur psychoanalysis designed to trample Alice's self-esteem and inflate Charlotte's insatiable ego. The relationship between Alice and Charlotte never seems real, but is nevertheless fascinating to watch as pure theatre.

The clothes, haircuts and volume of noise in the The Last Days Of Disco all seem suspiciously understated. The characters' appearances seem ironically stuck in the corporate world of the late 1990s, when the film was made, rather than the very early 1980s club scene. The conversations in the clubs take place in relaxed tones: in reality, no club worth the name played music at any volume except deafening, requiring conversations to be either shouted at close range or otherwise abandoned out of sheer exasperation.

The Last Days Of Disco ultimately achieves it's objective, although unintentionally: it is as lost as the culture it depicts.

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