COUPLES RETREAT (USA/15A/113mins)
Directed by Peter Billingsley. Starring Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau, Kristen Davis, Malin Akerman, Jason Bateman, Kristen Bell.
THE PLOT: Centred around four couples who head to an exotic resort for a little relationship healing, Vaughn is coupled with Akerman (The Watchmen, The Heartbreak Kid); his old buddy Favreau is coupled with Sex & The City's only likeable actress, Kristen Davis; Bateman (Arrested Development) is coupled with Bell (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) and the token black couple role (it's a big, big market in the US) is handled by the supersized Faizon Love (Elf, Idlewild) and young cutie Kali Hawk. Throw in a few wide-as-a-truck gags, and, hey, what more could you need?
THE VERDICT: Well, a sense of direction and purpose here would be nice, just about every moment worth seeing turning up in the trailer. The fact that an early trailer also featured Favreau and Davis' couple happily cheating - infidelities now cut from the movie - makes you realise how toothless this movie really is.
Co-written by Vaughn and Favreau, Vince's childhood friend Peter Billingsley (well-known in the US for being the kid in the much-loved 1983 flick A Christmas Story) is given the chance to direct his first feature. And it might just be his last, despite the big opening weekend.
It's been a while since Vince Vaughn's been in a truly loved movie, and that's not about to change any time soon, it seems. The funniest part of this movie? Listening to my fellow handsome, witty and debonair critics gleefully rip it to shreds afterwards...RATING: *
THE IMAGINARIUM OF DR PARNASSUS (UK/USA/12A/123mins)
Directed by Terry Gilliam. Starring Heath Ledger, Christopher Plummer, Lily Cole, Verne Troyer, Andrew Garfield, Tom Waits.
THE PLOT: In a plot that no doubt echoes Gilliam's own sentiments when it comes to his films and the general public, Dr. Parnassus (Plummer) wheels his rundown, vaudevillian wagon of wonders from place to place in the hope of bringing a little magic into the lives of your average English punter. Helping him in his attempt to conjure up a little old-fashioned magic is his sweet sixteen-year-old daughter, Valentina (Cole), trusty runaround Anton (Garfield), and miniature sidekick Percy (Troyer). Their efforts to entertain with the help of smoke and mirrors regularly falls on deaf, drunken ears though, and it's whilst scarpering from another fine latenight mess that the motley crew happen upon Tony (Ledger). Hanging from a bridge. By the neck.
When Tony discovers that a magic mirror on board the wagon sends people into their dream landscape, he figures all their money worries might be over. But he's got some nasty people on his tail. And the devil (Tom Waits, who seems almost typecast) has come to collect on a bet.
THE VERDICT: It would be easy to regard Terry Gilliam as the unluckiest big-name director out there today. Having seen his long-gestating Don Quixote pic bite the dust - its planned 'Making of...' DVD featurette becoming instead the heartbreaking documentary Lost In La Mancha (2002) - even the movies that Gilliam has managed to get to the screen - the nasty no-budget drama Tideland; the mean-spirited big-budget take on The Brothers Grimm (both 2005) - were sorry-verging-on-sordid affairs.
And all this from the man who directed The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen (1988), a much-abused film dismissed as an over-indulgent folly by critics, and often held up as one of Hollywood's most expensive flops.
And so, when Heath Ledger passed away during the making of Gilliam's latest offering, it seemed as though this ex-Python had finally hit rock bottom. To make matters worse, a title like The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus echoed, perhaps cheekily, the Barnum-esque moniker of Gilliam's most celebrated box-office failure. The whole thing began to feel like a career death wish. As it turns out, Imaginarium ain't half bad - even if it does play more like the work of a pompous film student than a master filmmaker.
Johnny Depp, our own Colin Farrell and a greasy Jude Law step in to play Tony through the looking glass, Depp in particular having some fun with the part, but Imaginarium is never much more than a curiousity, both in its story and its troubled execution.RATING: **
TRIANGLE (Australia/16/98mins)
Directed by Christopher Smith. Starring Melissa George, Liam Hemsworth, Emma Lung, Rachel Carpani, Michael Dorman.
THE PLOT: In a plot that is always in danger of eating itself, we first meet Jess (George) as she is getting her autistic son ready for a day out on her friend Greg's yacht. But Jess arrives at the harbour alone, and when the yacht is overturned by a freak storm, she joins Greg and his friends in taking refuge on a seemingly abandoned cruise liner. Where Jess experiences a strong sense of deja vu. As she sees the other guests being killed one by one by a mysterious, masked assailant, Jess begins to recognise a pattern. And so sets out to break the chain of events that lead her through her gory Groundhog Day.
THE VERDICT:
Young British filmmaker Christopher Smith's ambitious third feature, after Creep (2004) and Severance ('06), is one of those movies where you really have to pay attention if you want to feel the full benefit of the main character's confusion. Smith - who also wrote the script - tries a little too hard to be clever here; Triangle is no Momento. But it does conjure up some good scares amidst all the Escher madness. RATING: ***
THIRST (South Korea/I8/133mins)
Directed by Park Chan-wook. Starring Song Kang-ho, Kim Ok-bin, Hae-sook Kim, Ha-kyun Shin.
THE PLOT: Inspired by Emile Zola's Therese Raquin, we follow Sang-hyun (Kang-ho), an idealistic priest who offers himself up as a guinea pig in the search for a vaccine to battle the deadly Emmanuel virus. One infected blood transfusion later, and Sang-hyun is being hailed as a healer, with his own ailments miraculously disappearing in seconds. Slowly, our boy realises he needs a steady diet of fresh blood to keep so fit and indestructible, and he soon has an ally in the shape of a childhood friend, Tae-ju (Ok-bin), who's grown tired of living with her sickly "idiot" husband and her domineering mother.
From there, the plot concentrates on Sang-hyun and Tae-ju's illicit affair, and their good old-fashioned plot to do away with the hubby. Naturally, the guilt of it all sends them both into a spiral, gradually turning on one another as the body count starts to rise, thanks to Tae-ju's voracious appetite.
THE VERDICT: It's hard to escape the vampire genre right now, with the Twilight phenomenon prompting a green light for just about every bloodsucking project out there. Some - such as HBO's True Blood, CW's The Vampire Diaries and the upcoming feature adaptation of Limerick author Darren Shan's Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant - actually do suck (God, that Anna Paquin is such a bad actor). Others - well, I'm mainly thinking of Tomas Alfredson's masterful Let The Right One In, recently remade, no doubt badly, in the US - have real bite.
I was pretty sure Thirst was going to fit into the second category of vampire films, given that its co-writer and director is one Park Chan-wook, the man behind the glorious Old Boy (2003). This certainly isn't your average vampire thriller. What exactly Thirst is though is hard to figure out.
Park Chan-wook allows plenty of black humour to creep in alongside all the blood and bonking, but the strain of a film ten years in the making lends Thirst a jagged edge, and some jarring leaps of plot, that you can't help but feel were unintended. There's the distinct sense, by the closing half hour, of clutter, of no direction home. RATING: ***
STRANGER THAN FICTION: THE COVE
Screening tomorrow, the IFI's documentary strand Stranger Than Fiction presents The Cove (USA/PG/92mins), Louie Psihoyos' beautiful and confrontational undercover investigation into Japanese dolphin fishing. At the centre of it all is Richard O'Barry, a man whose fight for the rights of dolphins first began when he realised the error of his own ways. It was O'Barry who caught and trained the original TV superstar dolphin, Flipper.
Due to open here in the coming weeks, this is a chance to get an early look at this acclaimed documentary. The screening takes place tomorrow at 6.30pm.
OUR WONDERFUL HOME at the IFI
Also screening at the IFI is the new Irish feature, Our Wonderful Home (Ireland/Club/80mins), Ivan Kavanagh's drama centred around the death of the Celtic Tiger. Topical. Centred around a family struggling to come to terms with the good times heading south, this first-time feature is at the IFI today at 1.30pm. The director will be in attendance for a Q&A afterwards.
HORRORTHON
Those of you keen to get your scream on for Halloween should get yourselves along to the IFI's annual Horrorthon, which this year boasts the usual collection of old and new cinema frights to brown, season and thicken the underpants of even the toughest Bisto kid.
Running from October 22nd to the 26th, this year's festival kicks off with Megan Fox going all bloodthirsty and kick-ass in Jennifer's Body, written by the Oscar-winning Diablo Cody (Juno), whilst Conor McMahon's homegrown offering The Disturbed, Stephen Peros' The Undying and the acclaimed documentary Nightmares In Red, White And Blue: The Evolution Of The American Horror Film are just three other highlights of this October bank holiday weekend frightfest. Peros will be in attendance for his film.
For nostalgia fans, the 1984 classic Gremlins will be dusted down, alongside a trio of Romero classics (including Day Of The Dead), Serbia's recent contribution, Zone Of The Dead (cast members Joe Pilato and Ken Foree flying in for the occasion), and those late-night cult classics, such as Sinful Dwarf and Emmanuelle And The White Slave Trade. Nice. Check out www.ifi.ie for further details.