Beowulf (113 mins, 12A) Directed by Robert Zemeckis; starring Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, John Malkovich, Robin Wright Penn, Brendan Gleeson, Angelina Jolie
The Jane Austen Book Club (105 mins, 12A) Directed by Robin Swicord; starring Maria Bello, Emily Blunt, Kathy Baker, Amy Brenneman, Jimmy Smits, Hugh Dancy
Brick Lane (102 mins, 15) Directed by Sarah Gavron; starring Tannishtha Chatterjee, Satish Kaushik, Christopher Simpson
The Wayward Cloud (114 mins, 18) Directed by Tsai Ming-Liang; starring Lee Kang-Sheng, Chen Shiang-Chyi
I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (118 mins, 15) Directed by Tsai Ming-Liang; starring Lee Kang-Sheng
Weirdsville (90 mins, 15) Directed by Allan Moyle; starring Scott Speedman, Taryn Manning
Anna M (106 mins, 15) Directed by Michel Spinosa; starring Isabelle Carre, Gilbert Melki
Seamus Heaney considers it 'a work of the greatest imaginative vitality, a masterpiece where the structuring of the tale is as elaborate as the beautiful contrivances of its language'. Kingsley Amis, however, thought it 'a crass, purblind, infantile, featureless heap of gangrened elephant sputum'. They were talking about the earliest major literary text in our language, the 3,182-line Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, written in 10th-century England, set in eighth-century Denmark, and now brought to the screen by Robert Zemeckis, continuing his interest in excursions into the past (his Back to the Future trilogy) and his experiments in working between animation and live action (Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, The Polar Express).
The film takes in the main incidents of the poem. The Geatish warrior Beowulf (Ray Winstone) comes from what is now southern Sweden to the Danish court of King Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins) to defeat first the man-eating monster Grendel (Crispin Glover), then Grendel's beguiling mother (Angelina Jolie). Some years later, now himself a king, he confronts in mutually destructive combat a mighty dragon.
Co-scripted by comic-strip author Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, who shared a best original screenplay Oscar with Tarantino for Pulp Fiction, the film is technically a state-of-the-art affair in the way the digitally enhanced live-action figures are inseparable from the animated backgrounds, but it belongs to the blunt end of the cinematic cutting edge as far as the acting and dialogue go.
Winstone's Beowulf has been enhanced into an eight-foot giant, but you still expect him to tap Grendel's chest with his forefinger and say: 'You're out of fuckin' order!' The contrivance by which Beowulf's private parts are obscured as he strolls around Hrothgar's hall and does battle with Grendel would win him 10s from a judging panel that included Phyllis Dixey, Gypsy Rose Lee and Sally Rand. His carousing Myrmidons sing jocularly dirty songs like a gang of drunken rugby players and talk about 'bollocks' and 'wankers', though when it comes to sexual matters, everyone opts for the Middle English 'swiving'.
Anthony Hopkins with his Burtonesque Dylan Thomas delivery seems always on the point of saying: 'Do not chase Grendel into that good night', and the naked Jolie resembles Shirley Eaton as the 24-carat fall girl who got the stick in Goldfinger. Zemeckis believes his film 'should stir some debate in academia', but it's all pretty laughable sword-and-sorcery stuff and could well have been called Norse by Norse Worst
Literary matters less crass lie at the centre of writer-director Robin Swicord's The Jane Austen Book Club, a dramatic comedy in which middle-class Californian women form a reading group to study the novels of Jane Austen over a period of some six months. The object is to console one friend who's been deserted by her husband and another who's grieving over the loss of a pet dog. As there are six novels to be covered over six months, they need a sixth member and by chance this turns out to be a wealthy young Silicon Valley entrepreneur (Britain's Hugh Dancy), a sci-fi fan who's never read a word of Austen.
It's Steel Magnolias at an Open University summer school and everything that happens in this highly contrived, self-consciously literate, self-congratulatory elitist work echoes, refers to or is inspired by Austen. It will send shibboleths running down many people's spines, but I rather enjoyed it and especially liked the ensemble performances. The ultimate message seems to be that reading is the next best thing to sex, as well as a stimulating prelude to it.
Boiled down from a large literary work, though not a literary film, Sarah Gavron's Brick Lane is based on Monica Ali's prize-winning novel and resulted in an unnecessary flurry when the Bangladeshi community in the eponymous area of east London prevented it from being shot there. It's a small, touching picture about 17-year-old Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) being sent from her Bangladeshi village to marry a pompous, insensitive, self-deceiving older man in London. She bears him a son who dies, and two daughters, and much of the movie takes place in her early 30s when she's trying to break out of her housebound existence, get over her homesickness and come to terms with exile.
She takes a young lover, who initially brings tenderness and fulfilment to her life and introduces her to politics, though she later comes to reject him when he embraces a crude Islamic fundamentalism. Her husband (superbly played by Indian comedian Satish Kaushik) briefly comes into his own when he stands up against the arrogant cultural isolationism of the Islamists in their post-9/11 mode, and then he liberates Nazneen by deciding to return to Bangladesh.
The film rings true but is socially on the thin side. It would probably have been better as a TV mini-series, as were two comparable novels on similar themes, Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia and Zadie Smith's White Teeth
Great claims are being made for Malaysian-born Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang, currently the subject of a National Film Theatre retrospective. A couple of years back, I greatly enjoyed his Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), a haunting and haunted film set in a Taipei cinema. But I was puzzled and bored by his two latest pictures, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (getting an extended NFT screening) and The Wayward Cloud (currently receiving a limited release).
Featuring the same leading actor and actress, both are set during periods of sickness that affect the drifting, listless characters. In the perversely erotic The Wayward Cloud, the hero performs in porn movies and he and the heroine experience a debilitating heatwave and a chronic water shortage, and never has Taiwan been more wan.
I Don't Want to Sleep Alone finds the malaise in Malaysia as guest workers from Bangladesh, Japan, Taiwan and China cough their way around a smog-choked Kuala Lumpur, comforting and exploiting one another. In both, necrophilia is in the air. Clearly there's a talent here that's worthy of anyone's attention.
Briefly, two curiosities. The Canadian black comedy Weirdsville takes place on a snowy winter night in a small Ontario township. Two cheerful stoners, planning a robbery to pay off a debt, get involved with violent dwarfs, satanists, a millionaire hippie in a coma, a junkie prostitute who appears to be dead and a Russian drug baron and his henchman. Likable and mildly amusing.
Michel Spinosa's Anna M advertises itself as a Fatal Attraction-style thriller in which a deranged Parisian girl stalks a successful married doctor. It is, in fact, a case history of erotomania that takes its chapter headings - 'Illumination', 'Hope', 'Disappointment' and 'Hatred' - from the clinical names for the successive stages of the condition. It will be of interest to medical students.
