The Cliff Edge

Randy Newman’s music adds zing to ‘Princess’

‘The Princess and the Frog’ opened in the UK on Friday

This preview appeared in the December edition of Cue Entertainment Read more about ‘The Princess and the Frog’

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Walt Disney’s animated feature “The Princess & The Frog”, due for UK theatrical release on Feb. 5, marks a return to the classical form of hand-drawn animation by the creators of “The Little Mermaid” and “Aladdin”, John Musker and Ron Clements.

With songs and score by Oscar-winning composer Randy Newman, it takes the short Grimm Brothers fairy tale about a princess who kisses a frog and discovers a prince, and sets it down squarely in New Orleans in the jazz era of the 1920s.

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Mulligan, Mirren, Firth in Oscar nominations

Carey Mulligan as a beguiled 1960s schoolgirl in ‘An Education’

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – “An Education”, distributed in the UK by E1 Entertainment, was named for Best Picture in the Academy Awards nominations announced today with its star Carey Mulligan in the running for Best Actress along with Helen Mirren for Optimum Releasing’s “The Last Station”.

Other British contenders include Colin Firth as Best Actor for Icon UK’s “A Single Man” and, in the best adapted screenplay category, Nick Hornby for “An Education” and Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, and Tony Roche for “In the Loop”.

Twentieth Century Fox’s £2-billion grossing “Avatar” and Optimum’s “The Hurt Locker”, which Lionsgate Home Entertainment has already released in the UK on Blu-ray Disc and DVD, lead the running with nine nominations. They include Best Picture and Best Director for, respectively James Cameron and his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow.

More including the full list of nominations on the jump:

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Clive Owen cracking in warm and funny ‘Boys Are Back’

Clive Owen and Nicholas McAnulty in the Scott Hicks film now playing in the UK

I first met Clive Owen at the Edinburgh International Film Festival where he was promoting “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead”, a classic British crime picture from Mike Hodges. My friend Mike Kaplan, who produced the film, invited me to join him, Owen, Hodges and costar Jonathan Rhys Meyers for dinner and we had a fine time.

We hooked up again after the film’s London premiere when costar Charlotte Rampling also showed up for the party at the Red Lion pub in Islington, with Georgie Fame providing the bluesy entertainment. My daughter Shannon Bennett was along too and between that and meeting Owen again at the “King Arthur” premiere, she’s a fan for life, I think.

I’ve followed Owen’s career with keen interest and great admiration ever since. His new film, “The Boys Are Back” sees him at his best, as my colleague Kirk Honeycutt said in his review in The Hollywood Reporter: “Owen has many excellent performances to his credit, but this is his most honest, natural and beguiling.”

Below is my preview of the film that appeared in the November 2009 edition of Cue Entertainment and here’s the official UK website for “The Boys Are Back”

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Clive Owen has become a major Hollywood star despite the fact that his movies have often under-performed at the box office. His acting is universally praised and his performance in “The Boys Are Back” (Walt Disney, Jan. 22) is already generating talk of a BAFTA Award if not an Oscar. (Not the case as it turned out!)

It has usually been the directors who have carried the can for the less than sparkling commercial success of Owen’s films with Tony Gilroy (“Duplicity”, $78 million), Tom Tykwer (“The International”, $60 million) and Alfonso Cuaron (“Children Of Men”, $69 million) blamed for not delivering.

Still, “Sin City” ($159 million) and “Inside Man” ($184 million) were both hits and sequels are in the works. “The Boys Are Back” isn’t likely to break box office records but it does help sustain the Coventry-born star as a serious actor.

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Golden Globes may leave the best up in the air

George Clooney and Vera Farmiga in Jason Reitman’s ‘Up In the Air’

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – The Golden Globes film awards are more of a crapshoot than the Oscars and the Baftas but it would be good to see the excellent “Up In the Air,” its stars George Clooney and Vera Farmiga, and writer/director Jason Reitman collect some prizes tonight. Jonathan Romney makes an excellent point in his review of the film in The Independent on Sunday.

“Not only is this a rare Hollywood production that offers as much substance and panache as the cream of current US TV, I’d go further and say its cynical wit almost places it in the Billy Wilder bracket: ‘Up In the Air’ is as eloquent about today’s executive culture as ‘The Apartment’ was about that of 1960. It is a brutal, desolate film – but also a superb existential rom-com, and the most entertaining lesson in contemporary socio-economics that you could hope for.”

The odds, however, are against it, although hopes are greater in the Academy Awards. Tonight, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is more likely to go with big hits and favorite players. Given that the Globes like to spread awards around, Kathryn Bigelow may prove the fully deserved exception as best director for the tension-filled and haunting “The Hurt Locker,” but it will be no surprise if her ex-husband James Cameron’s monster hit “Avatar” wins as best drama. It remains a great shame that Jane Campion’s beautifully poetic “Bright Star” was spurned.

Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘The Hurt Locker’ may win her the best director prize

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Killingly funny ‘A Film With Me In It’ hits VOD in US

Dylan Moran digs himself into a very big hole in ‘A Film With Me In It’

Considering the large amount of dreck that hits cinemas, it’s baffling that a film as bright, inventive and hilarious as “A Film With Me In It,” starring the great Irish comedian Dylan Moran and writer Mark Doherty, gets lost in the shuffle.

I reviewed it for The Hollywood Reporter at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2008 and it was at the Toronto fest but it is already on DVD in the UK.

IFC releases it in the United States today in selected theatres and it is also available via IFC’s Video On Demand U.S. channels.

By Ray Bennett

EDINBURGH — The bodies keep piling up and so do the laughs in Irish director Ian Fitzgibbon’s clever and very funny black farce “A Film With Me In It.”

With an attitude towards sudden death as droll as in the best Ealing Studios comedies, the film lampoons the fevered imagination of screenwriters in its tale of two would-be filmmakers who must deal with one calamity after another in the confines of a basement apartment.



Featuring standout comic performances by Mark Doherty, who wrote the script, and Dylan Moran, the picture’s bracingly dark sense of humor and adherence to its own perverse logic will please audiences that enjoyed such comedies as “Withnail and I” and “A Fish Called Wanda.”



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Andy Serkis is a riot as punk rocker Ian Dury

Bill Milner and Andy Serkis in ‘Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll’, released in the UK today

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Rowdy and a bit ragged but wholly entertaining, Mat Whitecross‘ “Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll” is a biopic of British punk rocker Ian Dury with a sensational lead performance by Andy Serkis, best known as Gollum from the “Lord of the Rings” films.

Set around performances by Dury and his band the Blockheads at the Watford Palace Theatre, the film takes a surrealist path to relating the rocker’s journey from polio-stricken kid to top-of-the-charts entertainer.

It’s an energetic and vivacious film that will appeal to fans of punk rock worldwide and should find its place in the pantheon of great music-film biographies. First-time director Whitecross and Serkis should be in line for awards.

Read my full review in The Hollywood Reporter and more about Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

Low English farce in sloppy ‘St. Trinian’s 2′

Tamsin Egerton steals lame comedy from Rupert Everett and Colin Firth

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Strident, clumsy and pointless, “St. Trinian’s 2: The Legend of Fritton’s Gold” is a sequel to the 2007 attempt at reviving the squealing schoolgirl appeal of a series of Ealing Comedies from the 1950s.

Rupert Everett, who takes some of the blame as an executive producer, returns as the toothy headmistress of an institution populated by teenaged girls of many stripes, ranging from the beautiful to the wild and wacky and almost entirely witless.

Like the first modern remake, the film’s comedy is pitched as low as possible with a tale about missing pirate treasure.

Read my full review in The Hollywood Reporter and more about St. Trinian’s 2: The Legend of Fritton’s Gold

‘Up’ director Pete Docter talks about his fly-away hit

Ed Asner is the voice of an adventurous balloon maker in Disney/Pixar’s ‘Up’

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Pete Docter says that many people seem to have the impression that making computer animation is easy. “Somehow, they think, oh, it’s computers. You just type in ‘make movie’ and enter. They have the thought that it’s easier because we use a computer,” he says.

Docter knows all about computer animation. He directed the mammoth Disney/Pixar box office hit “Up”, which grossed $683 million in theatres around the world and has sold more than 6 million units, grossing more than $101 million, since it was released on DVD and Blu-ray Disc in the US on Nov. 10.

The tale of crusty widower Carl, who flies his home using balloons to a faraway paradise with only a boy scout for company, hits UK stores on DVD and Blu-ray on Feb. 15.

The Minnesota-born animator also had a hand in the stories for “Toy Story”, “Toy Story 2” and “Wall-E”, and directed “Monsters, Inc.”, which grossed $525.4 million in cinemas globally in 2001 and sold more than 11 million copies on DVD in the US the following year.

He says the truth is that making animated computer animation is no different from other films. “It’s the same process as live-action filmmaking and just as hard. We think about overs, twoshots and masters, lighting, all the same things. It’s a very hand-made process,” Docter says.

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Mischief and sparkle in Mexico’s ‘I’m Gonna Explode’

Juan Pablo di Santiago and Maria Deschamps as kids on the run, sort of

Gerardo Naranjo’s “I’m Gonna Explode”, which I reviewed for The Hollywood Reporter at the Venice International Film Festival in September 2008, opens today in the U.K. Released by Artificial Eye, it’s running at London’s Renoir Cinema and in some other cities, and is well worth catching.

By Ray Bennett

VENICE — Two restless teenagers decide to run away together but do it by camping out on the roof of the boy’s rich father’s hilltop villa in Mexican filmmaker Gerardo Naranjo’s effervescent thriller.

Engaging and often funny but always with the suggestion that something could go badly and violently wrong at any moment, the film contains two wonderfully fresh performances by Maria Deschamps and Juan Pablo di Santiago as the teenagers.

Bound to do well in Spanish-language territories, the film could also find receptive audiences in other markets. Its young stars, along with second-time director Naranjo, will no doubt be heard from again.

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‘Up In the Air’ tops my 2009 Top 10 list

George Clooney and Anna Kendrick in Jason Reitman’s ‘Up In the Air’

My Top 10 list for The Hollywood Reporter of the best movies released in North America in 2009. It was a very tough call between “Up In the Air” (which Paramount releases in the U.K. on Jan. 15) and “The Hurt Locker” (which is out now on DVD and Blu-ray Disc) for top place as they are both excellent. The list also excludes some titles screened only in the UK or at festivals, and they will be addressed in another post.

1. Up in the Air
2. The Hurt Locker
3. Tulpan
4. Bright Star
5. Moon
6. Summer Hours
7. Up
8. Star Trek
9. Broken Embraces
10. Avatar

Read THR chief film critic Kirk Honeycutt’s rundown of our Top 10 lists