Byron Shire Echo September 16, 2008
www.echo.net.au
CINEMA MAKE IT HAPPEN Who would have thought that it would come to this – I’m beginning to get a real kick out of dance movies. Among the most formulaic of teen pics, they are also the ones that are bound to flee fastest from your memory bank before you can remember where you left your car (though in my case that can be quite a long time), and are universally scoffed at for achieving exactly what they routinely set out to do, viz. positively reinforce in youngsters the worth of having a goal and persevering to attain it. Corny? Sure, and we cynical elders know better but, leaving the cinema, I saw a little girl in pink tights joyously practising some of the steps she had
just seen (while her mother robotically checked her text messages) and it made me unaccountably happy. Lauryn is an Indiana gal who wants to study dance at an exclusive Chicago academy. Unfortunately, both parents having passed, she is stuck in Woop Woop with her brother, Joel, trying to keep the family gas station from going under. He’s one of Bruce Springsteen’s blue collar battlers, burdened by bills and resentful of his sister’s high falutin’ ambition. But a girl’s gotta do ... Predictably, Lauryn bones it at the rigorous audition and things look pretty grim as, while she consoles herself with a burger, her overparked car is towed away in the pouring rain. She lands on her feet when she is taken in by the waitress who obligingly lines her up with a job at Ruby’s, a flash night club where, inevitably, Lauryn grabs her chance to strut her stuff on stage. It is also at Ruby’s where she meets Clay, the Boy. Mary Elizabeth Winstead is delightful as the
lead and the relationships she has with the two blokes in her life as well as the owner and performers at Ruby’s is, if copybook, entirely believable. What is unusual is Winstead’s prowess on the hoof – though undeniably beautiful, she is not much of a dancer and displays no natural fluidity in her movements. Which may be why there are fewer routines than you might expect (see ‘Step Up’ 1 and 2), and, of them, many seem decidedly raunchy for the target audience (but who knows these days?). Enlivened by a pulsating but not overdone soundtrack, beautifully photographed, with some great shots of the Windy City, this was a suitable compensation for the mind numbing din of The Mummy. ~ John Campbell
THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR If, after the third instalments of ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ and Raiders of the Lost Ark, you had concluded that the boys’ own adventure flick has been ruined by a tsunami of SFX and CGI, you will not be dissuaded of that view by this brainless schemozzle. Following a lengthy preamble in which we get the back story of the ancient Emperor Han’s lust for immortality, we flash forward to 1946 and meet Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) and his English missus, Evelyn (Maria Bello), on their Scottish estate. She is bored with promoting her romantic novels and Rick is a buffoon who shoots fish, so it is probably for the best when they hightail it to China, where their boofheaded son, Alex (Luke Ford), has MBUFTU!JO!EJHJUBM!TVSSPVOE!TPVOE
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excavated the tomb of the aforementioned evil emperor, in the process activating his un-deadness (the astonishing terracotta army of the historic Emperor Qin Shihuang was not unearthed until the 1970s). The proverbial then hits the fan. It is pointless to try and follow any logical sequence of events from that moment, for director Rob Cohen is only interested in skylarking with all of the technology at his fingertips, resulting in a blur of fights and chasings and explosions. The highlight for me came with the sudden appearance of the Yeti – this is when the doughty O’Connells, trekking to Shangri-La, are embroiled in a huge stink in the mountains with Han’s legions, all of whom are resurrected too. I don’t recall ever seeing an abominable snowman on the screen, much less three of them, and as they stormed out of the snowy wild I wondered why it had taken all this time for them to appear. In body shape, they resembled giant apes, only with white fur, but compared to the miraculous creatures that have recently sprung from the fertile imagination of Mexican Guillermo del Toro, their design was as dull as dishwater. The avalanche that succeeded their intervention was impressive, but I was only fooling myself in thinking that it might be the climax, for we were still at least forty-five eardrumshattering minutes away from that blessed event. The skeletal army of the dead in the Big Battle at the end were diverting, but it was a desperately tough couple of hours and liberation, when it finally arrived, came at a soul destroying price, with all indications pointing to there being a Mummy 4 in the pipeline. Gawd help us. ~ John Campbell
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PINEAPPLE EXPRESS Pineapple Express is a rare thing: a stoner comedy where being stoned isn’t a requirement to enjoying it. Pot comedies have avoided using cops, guns, and criminals in full-blown action mode – until now.The writers of this film don’t celebrate the pleasures of smoking marijuana so much as mine humour from the problems associated with weed. Seth Rogen plays Dale Denton, a 30-year-old process server who gets through his days
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use – paranoia, gaps in logic and an ill-placed trust in their fellow man. That’s when the movie is at its funniest, as the script filters the clichés of the buddy-comedy chase through the haze of pot smoke. It’s like a Cheech & Chong version of Midnight Run. This is a tale of male bonding in which friendship ends up being the most important thing in the film. ~ Lounge Cinema
of delivering subpoenas by smoking pot regularly and hanging out with his highschool-student girlfriend Angela (Amber Heard). But when Dale sees a murder involving a policewoman he knows he’s in trouble. When Dale and his mate Saul (James Franco) try to think their way out of their predicament, they are hampered by the residual effects of their marijuana
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