Reign of Fire (102 mins, 15) Directed by Rob Bowman; starring Christian Bale, Matthew McConaughey, Izabella Scorupco
The Guru (95 mins, 15) Directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer; starring Jimi Mistry, Heather Graham, Marisa Tomei
Tortilla Soup (103 mins, PG) Directed by María Ripoll; starring Hector Elizondo, Jacqueline Obradors, Tamara Mello, Elizabeth Peña
Black Knight (95 mins, PG) Directed by Gil Junger; starring Martin Lawrence, Tom Wilkinson, Marsha Thomason
Be My Star (65 mins, nc) Directed by Valeska Grisebach; starring Nicole Gläser, Christopher Schöps
Fifty years ago when Hollywood transposed War of the Worlds from the Home Counties to California, there were chauvinistic complaints from British critics who wanted to see their own country despoiled by Martians. So we should feel flattered when, in Rob Bowman's grand dystopian SF horror flick Reign of Fire, a team of American filmmakers choose to look at the impending end of western civilisation from the perspective of England in 2020.
The picture begins, like Quatermass and the Pit, with the discovery by tunnel-builders of ancient terrors buried deep beneath the streets of London. Scarcely has her name faded from the opening credits when Alice Krige (boss of the building site) has been consumed by the fire from re-awakened dragons, leaving her schoolboy son, Quinn, to grow up to be Christian Bale. He's the brains-and-brawn leader of a sorry remnant of Englishmen living in a crumbling Northumbrian castle. In the futuristic Mad Max manner, this is a re-tribalised medieval world with a few leftover hi-tech features to make it even more miserable. The dragons fly gracefully around them, living off ash and scorching the earth with the jets of napalm they generate in their nostrils. Meanwhile, Quinn's community merely keeps them at bay.
It's a good-looking film, designed by Wolf Kroeger who created the blitzed Stalingrad in Enemy at the Gates, and photographed by Adrian Biddle who lit James Cameron's Aliens in similarly Stygian style.
This is pretty effective stuff, but the twist comes when a party of Americans arrive with battered tanks, armoured cars and a single helicopter. The helicopter is flown by an intrepid woman (Izabella Scorupco) but the US force is commanded by a muscular, hoarse-voiced character called Van Zan. He looks as if he's been drawn by Frank Frazetta, but we come to recognise him as Matthew McConaughey. Van Zan's over here to destroy the giant bull dragon lurking in the ruins of London and responsible for impregnating all the females that have been terrorising the world's cities.
It's amusing to see the two mild-mannered juveniles, Bale and McConaughey, transformed into pecs-rippling tough guys the way Disney child actor Kurt Russell suddenly emerged as a macho hero in Escape from New York, a similarly dystopian piece. Most interesting, however, is the way this story develops. The belligerent Van Zan is conducting a crusade against the dragons and is intent on drawing the reluctant Brits into an alliance, by force if necessary, to make them assume the mantle of St George and attack the traditional foe. Whether or not this was thought through before the events of 11 September or modified by them, the film now takes on the aspect of an inspirational allegory. America as the dominant partner revives the special relationship with Britain to extirpate the implacable terrorising beasts by pursuing the literally seminal bull dragon (Bin Laden/ Saddam Hussein) to his lair. The armchair warrior Sir Donald of Rumsfeld would love it.
Daisy von Scherler Mayer's The Guru is a baleful American comedy that attempts to bring together the current taste for Bollywood musicals and the continuing attempts by academics, filmmakers and opportunistic journalists to establish pornography as a genre and a respectable subject for literary study. A good-looking Bombay dance teacher, Ramu (Jimi Mistry), so naïve that he makes Candide look like Bertrand Russell, comes to New York to become a movie star in the image of his hero John Travolta, live in a penthouse and drive a red Mercedes. Instead he has to share a squalid Brooklyn pad with three similar losers and gets a job working in porn flicks directed by the charming Michael McKean.
Ramu's problem is that he can't sustain an erection, but instead of reading the Kama Sutra he takes lessons from porn star Sharrona (Heather Graham, the porn queen in Boogie Nights). This knowledge he hands on as spiritual wisdom to the gullible rich of Park Avenue, whom he meets through a dim socialite (Marisa Tomei) hooked on things Indian. As a result he becomes a celebrity, 'the sexual guru', before getting sentimentally penitent. It's a leering, childish and, for all its supposed affection for Indians and acceptance of homosexuals, retrogressive film. There is one funny joke, however. Ramu is discovered in flagrante by the porn actress's boyfriend and pretends to be fixing her bathroom. 'Where are his tools?' the boyfriend asks. 'He's a holistic plumber,' the girl replies.
Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman was a delightful 1995 addition to the cycle of gourmet movies that began with Tony Richardson's Tom Jones and was still something to savour when Bob Giraldi served up Dinner Rush earlier this year. María Ripoll's Tortilla Soup is takeaway junk food by comparison. It's a literal transposition of Eat Drink Man Woman from Taipei to Los Angeles, where the trustworthy Hector Elizondo becomes the celebrated chef, a Hispanic widower with three grown-up daughters who still live with him but want to break away from home and his elaborate Sunday dinners. The food is now Mexican, and though it looks good enough to eat, the picture falls as flat as the flattest tortilla John Steinbeck ever backed away from. This is largely because of the flat-footed direction and the total absence of that rich sense of community that informed Ang Lee's movie. Raquel Welch overacts appallingly as a merry widow with an eye on Elizondo. The youngest daughter's boyfriend is a handsome foreign student, a boy from Brazil, though not the Hitler clone that description suggests, but the son of Klaus Kinski, which sounds as sinister. Nikolai Kinski, however, seems a well-balanced chap and looks rather like Harry Belafonte.
You may recall that, on the opening page of Tortilla Flat, Steinbeck writes of the band of raffish eccentrics in the eponymous district of California's Monterey peninsula: 'Danny's house was not unlike the Round Table, and Danny's friends were not unlike the knights of it.' The wretched Black Knight takes this connection literally by suddenly transporting the moat cleaner (black stand-up comic Martin Lawrence) at a run-down Los Angeles theme park, 'Medieval World', to fourteenth-century England. There, with the help of a drunken knight errant (the ubiquitous Tom Wilkinson) and a Nubian serving girl, he leads a revolution against a usurper. It's yet another version of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur , with a script as pallid as the acting and sets. Even at 95 minutes it's the longest day's journey into knight you'll ever undertake.
Be My Star (Mein Stern), a modest, painfully honest account of the fumbling love affair between two 14-year-old working-class kids in Berlin, is the graduation film of the young Austrian director Valeska Grisebach. It's a promising picture, and her older American contemporaries María Ripoll and Daisy von Scherler Mayer (see above) should see it and perhaps be reminded of why as students they wanted to become directors.
