Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides & Win Win reviews (BBC Radio Scotland Movie Cafe)

Click here to listen to the show on BBC iPlayer

Click the link above to hear me, along with Scotland on Sunday film critic Siobhan Synnot and the show's host Janice Forsyth, reviewing the new Pirates of the Caribbean film and the third film from The Station Agent director Tom McCarthy, Win Win. We also discussed the newly-announced Edinburgh International Film Festival programme and the reception in Cannes to Terrence Malick's Tree of Life (which went on to win the Palmes d'Or a few days later). Also on the show is an interview with Vidal Sassoon, the trend-setting hairdresser who is the subject of a new documentary. The programme is available to listen to until Sunday 29th May.

Both films are in UK cinemas now. Watch the trailers below.

Alice in Wonderland (futuremovies.co.uk)

In the words of The Big Lebowski, “sometimes, there’s a man”. And if there was ever a director well-matched to a film project it’s Tim Burton with this new version of Alice in Wonderland. Sure enough, Burton’s trip down the rabbit-hole looks amazing, overflowing with inventive details in its characters and imagined locations, and pushing CGI possibilities to bring Lewis Carroll’s stories to the screen in a whole new way. Curiously though, this Wonderland lacks drama, and Burton’s seemingly inexhaustible visual imaginings can’t quite hide the film’s narrative shortcomings.

In this version of the story, written by Linda Woolverton, Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is in her early 20s and has forgotten Wonderland; the only evidence of her visit there as a young girl is a dream that troubles her every night. After informing us through a little scene-setting preamble that Alice is about to be forced into marriage with an insufferable bore, Burton brings in the more familiar story elements; the white rabbit, Alice’s tumble down the hole, ‘drink me’, ‘eat me’ and then Wonderland itself. Or more accurately, Underland; “wonderland”, we learn, was a mis-hearing by the 8-year old Alice – this world is more clearly geographically defined, in relation to ours, than we had previously known.

It turns out that Alice’s return has been foretold, and there is hope amongst the citizens of Underland that she could be the one to slay the dreaded Jabberwock, and return the power of rule from the decapitation-obsessed Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) to her floaty, peace-loving sister, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway). This being a Disney story, there’s never any doubt as to whether Alice will take up the sword and ultimately prevail, but would it have been too much for Burton to have added some suspense, some danger with a little edge? The climax, when it comes, is an epic battle that’s become a too familiar sight in many recent blockbusters, and it feels particularly out of place in this hitherto quirky world.

Thankfully though, drama, or lack of it, is not the make-or-break factor of Burton’s film. Burton’s visual creativity has always been most evident in macabre settings, and Carroll’s stories’ dark undertones - the awful reign of the Red Queen, the air of madness that pervades everything in Wonderland - prove fertile ground for his unique imagination. The look of the film is assuredly fantastical, with very effective CGI sets making Underland something halfway between photo-real and cartoon. This works well, and is particularly impressive in IMAX 3D, but it is the reinvention of the story’s familiar characters that is the most impressive of Burton’s achievements.

The Red Queen with her oversized head, played brilliantly by Helena Bonham Carter, Johnny Depp’s sadly self-aware Mad Hatter and the creepily endearing Cheshire Cat - perfectly voiced by Stephen Fry - are all true to their literary roots, but given a fresh twist that means meeting them here again is hugely enjoyable. Through a combination of excellent casting and carefully highlighted details of behaviour, even characters making very brief appearances make a strong impression. If Burton had given that same attention to detail to the telling of the tale, this would have been a sure-fire classic. He treats the eyes and tickles the funny bone, no doubt, but the heart and mind are left wanting.

7/10

Alice in Wonderland is out now. This review first published on futuremovies.co.uk

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (futuremovies.co.uk)

The prospect of watching a Terry Gilliam film is often more satisfying than actually sitting down to experience it. He has a singular imagination and is able to come up with breathtaking visual concepts, but his films often demonstrate his weakness when it comes to threading these ideas together to produce coherent and meaningful stories. This same weakness is evident in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus: Gilliam gleefully fills the screen with stunning and original images, but struggles to combine them in a way that makes sense.

While much of the attention around Imaginarium has focused on the fact of Heath Ledger’s untimely death halfway through production, the character he plays is not the central focus of the film. The story opens in contemporary London, where the titular Doctor (Christopher Plummer) is putting on a rather shambolic sideshow for the drunken post-clubbing crowd. Run by Parnassus and a handful of misfits, including his daughter Valentina (Lily Cole) and young dreamer Anton (Andrew Garfield), the travelling show appears to be little more than an eccentric diversion. That is until an inebriated volunteer accidentally steps through the mirror at the back of the stage, and it becomes clear that Parnassus has more powers than appearances suggest. “Don’t worry if you don’t understand it all immediately”, says Parnassus to a policeman who stops to see what the commotion is about, and he could well be talking to the cinema audience too.

The film trundles along, a bit like Parnassus’s rickety Imaginarium, continuously in danger of falling apart and lacking a clear destination, but curiously fascinating to watch. We discover that Parnassus hides a secret; Valentina’s life is indebted to the shady Mr Nick (Tom Waits), due to a wager Dr. P struck with this devilish figure in the past. But the reappearance of Mr Nick, keen to collect his due, is paralleled by the arrival of another mysterious stranger, Tony (Ledger, whose entrance is goulishly macabre). Gilliam brings each of these characters into the frame before ultimately, through various twists of plot, returning to the world (or worlds) behind the mirror.

Gilliam has always been a visual artist first and a storyteller second, and he conjures up some thrilling treats for the eyes here, not just in the Imaginarium sequences but also in the thousand-year-old Parnassus’s various flashbacks. But visual creativity alone does not a movie make, and often these striking and painstakingly realised images are fleetingly glimpsed and lack a narrative context to make them resonate.

So what then, of Heath Ledger’s final appearance on film? In the best performances of his short career, Ledger displayed an ability to effectively make himself disappear, so all we saw was the character. In Imaginarium this isn’t the case: we are always aware of Ledger playing a role, and his portrayal of Tony seems more like a series of sketches, as if he was still at the stage of trying out different approaches for a character that he was gradually bringing into focus. It’s a performance that is slight in comparison to his screen-burning Joker or his heart-wrenching Ennis Del Mar, but in a sense it fits well in the context of Gilliam’s film. The shifting nature of the character and the film’s fantastical tone mean it feels quite appropriate for Tony to take the form of Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell in the moments that he passes through the mirror. Those performances vary hugely in quality - Depp is great, Law is forgettable and Farrell disappears under the weight of the swiftly unravelling plot – but the mere fact of their presence in the film stands as a testament to Gilliam’s creative ingenuity in the face of a seemingly insurmountable setback.

It is the director’s ceaseless creativity that stands out in Imaginarium, and makes the film worth watching despite its narrative and logical flaws. The successful completion of this film may be just what Gilliam needed to spur himself on to better things; perhaps the Don Quixote film that has so long eluded him could yet become a reality.

6/10

This review originally appeared on futuremovies.co.uk.