Weekly round-up

An arranged marriage, California vino,
flies in space and some homegrown misanthropy

by MALCOLM FRASER,
MATTHEW HAYS,
MARK SLUTSKY
and CHRISTOPHER SYKES

Brick Lane
Though it’s beautifully shot from the get-go, a feeling of familiarity sets in early with Brick Lane, the adaptation of the controversial Monica Ali novel. But thankfully, this intriguing film sets aside expectations and moves ahead into pleasantly surprising territory.

Indian beauty Tannishtha Chatterjee plays a Bangladeshi 17-year-old, looking mighty uncomfortable as she’s slotted into an arranged marriage with a balding, overweight man 20 years her senior. They then head off to Britain to start a new life—but Chatterjee is predictably unhappy, and longs for her old life and sister, who mysteriously never replies to any of her many letters. It’s the old immigrant story of the home and the world, but Ali’s source material and Sarah Gavron’s keen direction keep things off-kilter. Chatterjee launches an affair with a man closer to her age, but then 9/11 happens, and her husband suddenly takes on a dimension she hasn’t seen: courage and resolve, in the face of growing religious extremism in London’s Muslim community.

The story of a woman living in an immigrant population far away from home has been done before. What amazes me is how filmmakers and novelists continue to be able to breathe fresh life into the form. Brick Lane, along with the forthcoming Heaven on Earth (which is Deepa Mehta’s best film to date), provide new, inspirational variations on the theme. (MH)

LONDON CALLING: Brick Lane

Bottle Shock
Telling the story of California’s Napa Valley wine producers and their struggle for legitimacy in the 1970s, Bottle Shock feels at times like a prequel to Sideways, and you can bet associations with the overpraised Alexander Payne mid-life crisis comedy were what the producers of this well-intentioned but fatally meandering flick were counting on.

Bill Pullman plays Jim Barrett, a stubborn, perfectionist California winemaker with a freewheeling hippie son (Chris Pine). As they, along with hot babe intern Sam (Rachael Taylor) and wine-smart buddy Gustavo (Freddy Rodriguez), struggle to produce a perfect American vino, English-born, Paris-residing enthusiast Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman) is setting up a wine-tasting pitting California plonk against the French in a challenge that would shake the booze world to its very core. Their paths eventually intersect, and the rest is history.

And history it does feel like. For some reason, this tale, which is pretty light and frothy at its core, takes forever to unfold. You’d think, by the time Rickman shows up in the U.S. and starts meeting local vintners, things would be pretty much underway, but the movie, which clocks in just under two hours, takes forever to get things in motion. Even at the climax, the big tasting, we’re treated not only to Rickman’s inaugural speech in full, but also his introductions for each of the jury members. Speeches like that are bad enough in real life—putting them in a fictionalized version of events, where you presumably have the luxury to skip over the boring bits, is just sadistic. (MS)

Fly Me to the Moon
If there’s something positive to take away from the first animated feature entirely in 3D, it’s that someone’s eventually going to make one hell of a kids’ flick with this technology. Unfortunately for director Ben Stassen, Fly Me to the Moon never even manages to get off the ground.

Stassen is something of a revolutionary in the field: his company nWave accounts for nearly a quarter of all 3D IMAX films. So one would trust the visuals to be in competent hands. Yet there’s no bridge between the impressive production values and a story arc able to satisfy the most generous post-pubescent viewer.

Free-spirited tween Nat (voiced by Trevor Gagnon) grew up worshiping Grandpa’s (Christopher Lloyd) yarns of cross-Atlantic adventures alongside Amelia Earhart. Inspired by these stories, Nat convinces his two best buds to stow away onboard NASA’s next launch—the infamous Apollo 11 mission to the moon. How does one hitch a ride to the moon, you ask? Nat and his crew are all itty-bitty houseflies.

While aboard, the young flyers covertly salvage the mission by rewiring a faulty panel. Gramps helps out back on Earth by foiling Soviet spy fly Yegor (Tim Curry) who aims to bring down mission control during re-entry.

Props to Buzz Aldrin for clarifying matters in the closing credits of the film. Had he not popped on-screen to explain it’s a scientific impossibility for flies to have saved the Apollo 11 mission, I fear we’d be witnessing a rash of insomnia amongst seven-year-olds for years to come. (CS)

Le Cas Roberge
In this ostensible comedy, low-end Quebec TV personality Benoît Roberge stars as low-end Quebec TV personality Benoît Robert, a misanthropic and self-hating loser who never stops complaining about his crappy career, the dire state of the Quebec television industry and life and humanity in general. When his friend, embittered actor-turned-children’s TV host Stéphane (Stéphane E. Roy) proposes that they take a road trip to Rouyn-Noranda to write a film script, Roberge figures it’s the solution to all his problems. But before long, his sour personality turns the trip as nightmarish as his day-to-day life in Montreal.

CAREER SUICIDE:
Le Cas Roberge

His distinctly unlikeable character is perhaps modelled on Larry David’s in Curb Your Enthusiasm, another self-deprecating persona who gets mileage out of socially unacceptable behaviour. But he lacks David’s comic talents; while a couple of Roberge’s misanthropic rants are funny (“Kids are like squirrels,” he whines to proud father Roy. “They look cute from far away, but up close they just look like little rats”), for the most part, you just feel irritated at him.

If nothing else, the movie is ballsy; Roberge, who’s made his living on crapola like Loft Story, doesn’t just bite the hand that feeds him but practically chews it off. The media industry has been satired to death already, and Roberge’s blatant contempt for low-end, regional working TV people is unpleasant. Add to this the fact that in true post-Woody Allen French film style, his schlub of a character still has no problem scoring chicks, and it just becomes unbearable. After this career suicide note, if Roberge never works in Quebec media again, I can’t imagine anyone but him complaining. (MF)

Brick Lane, Bottle Shock and
Le Cas Roberge open this Friday,
Aug. 15; Fly Me to the Moon opens
next Friday, Aug. 22

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