Richard Curtis, making his debut as a director, tries to cover every possible version of romantic comedy in his film Love Actually. On the whole, he isn't altogether too successful. Throwing in as many respected British actors as possible (and Martine McCutcheon), Curtis' goal is clearly to drown us in charming humour until we like the movie. But he never really comes close to winning the audience over. While there are bright spots in the film, they are marred by a swamp of cliches and extreme overlength. Probably the best performance is from Emma Thompson--her strand, involving a typically grumpy Alan Rickman as her husband, tempted by a younger woman, is the best written and reminds us what a great actress she really is. Another standout is the great Bill Nighy hamming it up as an aged rockstar aiming for a big comeback. But, as engaging as these stories are, they are ruined by the continual switches to other far less interesting strands. Some are so pointless and uninvolving you wonder how they made it into the film (Keira Knightley's section particularly comes to mind), while others show a little potential but are let down by an at times awful script (especially apparent in Laura Linney's storyline). Pros like Colin Firth and Hugh Grant seem to be sleepwalking through their segments, and Rowan Atkinson's obligatory cameo is so dreadfully unfunny it makes the mind boggle.
The film (very slowly) builds to a big set of conclusions on Christmas Eve, with people taking off after their lovers and an awful lot of story threads being tied up at Heathrow Airport. Curtis continually shoves big romantic endings in our face, hoping that ten big resolutions instead of the traditional one will have us gushing with happiness. He doesn't succeed. Mostly, due to the choppiness of the film you really don't care much for a lot of the characters, which really is the major problem of the film. There's some good material here: along with Nighy and Thompson, Liam Neeson shows good chemistry with his onscreen son and Kris Marshall's escapade to America is brief and enjoyable. But anything good is inevitably mixed in with all the bad, and so the little quality that does exist is mostly lost. Some fairly judicious editing and the wholesale dropping of some of the storylines would have led to a big improvement in quality. As it stands, Love Actually is quite a big disappointment.
**

Peter Weir's Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World really is a magnificent achievement. Adapting the sprawling Patrick O'Brian novels, Weir perfectly paints a portrait of British naval life during the Napoleonic Wars, using his excellent ensemble and the wonderful set of the H.M.S. Surprise. Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany counterbalance themselves perfectly as the duo Aubrey and Maturin, respectively captain and physician on the ship. Their partnership makes an effective contrast from the last film they appeared together in (the flawed A Beautiful Mind) in which Crowe was the thinker and Bettany the more vivacious. Both have fine comic and dramatic moments and effectively turn the characters into 3-dimensional people. The rest of the acting is good too, especially young Max Pirkis who is quite impressive as a young midshipman.
The film is not an action film--far from it. It has two spectacular battle sequences which are both perfectly realistic and gripping. But the middle of the film shows us what life is like on the ship through a series of subplots which also slowly pushes the narrative forward. As it is so well written and performed, this middle section suceeds, but it is bogged down by perhaps one plot too many. However it all helps to deepen our understanding of the characters and really makes you care for the crew, and makes the final battle all the more powerful. Weir shies away from demonising the Surprise's enemies (the French) and they remain mostly an invisible enemy, in keeping with the film's confinment of the story to the ship.
Overall Master and Commander really is one of the best achievements of the year, and another excellent film to add to Weir's impressive canon. It will not appeal to everyone, but there is much to appreciate here. Highly recommended.
*****

I was surprised to see Jon Favreau's name as director of the kid's Christmas comedy Elf--the man behind Swingers didn't seem right for this project. In fact, he makes a good job of it, crafting a perfectly lovely Christmas film that stands head and shoulders above other recent children's films. After a slightly rushed opening, Will Ferrell's demented, child-like elf Buddy goes to New York to find his father (James Caan). As usual with these types of films, the most fun is had in the laugh-centred first half. Ferrell makes great use of Buddy, and all of his 'fish-out-of-water' sequences provide several laughs. The great Zooey Deschanel is a cut above most love interests in these kinds of films, and Caan mugs for the screen just enough to be entertaining. Elf drags at the end, with the needless introduction of some pointless villains and, of course, the final moral message to wrap it all up nicely. Still, Elf is perfect cheery entertainment in these depressing times.
***

With The Matrix Revolutions finally comes the end of the Wachowski brothers' bombastic sci-fi trilogy, following the immensly disappointing Matrix Reloaded in May. Having been let down by the second film, I entered with very low expectations, and yet Revolutions still did not manage to meet them. It begins 'profoundly', with Neo stuck in an otherworldy train station (be sure to brush up on what happened in the last film, or you'll find yourself trying to remember why everything's going on for the first 15 minutes) and soon leaps into the ending of the war between humans and machines, taking place almost exclusively in the real world. Although the visual flair that has always existed in the films remains, the film is ruined by an excrable script with some of the flattest dialouge I've heard in a long time. Not only that, but the characters we know and love take a backseat to excurciating, massively cliched sideplots, the choice ones being a grizzled army general and a plucky young recruit bonding over the war, and two women nearly single-handedly taking down a machine the size of a skyscraper with some homemade missiles. Meanwhile the brooding zealot Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) of the first two films does nothing but sit back and let the faily dull Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith) drive them to Zion, and Neo & Trinity are missing for what seems an age during the middle section. Of course, the visual effects are very impressive, but often they seem wasted, especially in the huge war sequence, where humans in large machine-gun toting robots take on a mass of squid machines--entertaining for about a minute or two, then just dull for the next 20 as the same shots are rehashed again and again. The film has a total lack of tension from start to finish, especially during the final fight between Neo and Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving, once again the only thing worth watching) and ends in the most boringly ambiguous way possible. All in all, a total mess.
*

Update: My ranked list of films seen this year, mark is out of five:

1/Mystic River ***** (Clint Eastwood)
2/Kill Bill Vol. 1 ***** (Quentin Tarantino)
3/The Magdalene Sisters ***** (Peter Mullan)
4/Etre et Avoir ***** (Nicholas Philibert)
5/City Of God ***** (Fernando Meirelles)
6/21 Grams **** 1/2 (Alejandro González Inárritu)
7/Whale Rider **** 1/2 (Niki Caro)
8/Finding Nemo **** 1/2 (Andrew Stanton)
9/Pirates Of The Carribean: The Curse of the Black Pearl **** 1/2 (Gore Verbrinski)
10/The Lawless Heart **** 1/2 (Tom Hunsinger, Neil Hunter)
11/Belleville Rendez-Vous **** 1/2 (Sylvian Chomet)
12/Swimming Pool **** (Francois Ozon)
13/Good Bye, Lenin! **** (Wolfgang Becker)
14/X-Men 2 **** (Bryan Singer)
15/Phone Booth **** (Joel Schumacher)
16/Seabiscuit *** 1/2 (Gary Ross)
17/Matchstick Men *** 1/2 (Ridley Scott)
18/Down With Love *** 1/2 (Peyton Reed)
19/Buffalo Soldiers *** 1/2 (Gregor Jordan)
20/I Capture The Castle *** 1/2 (Tim Fywell)
21/Hulk *** 1/2 (Ang Lee)
22/Bend It Like Beckham *** (Gurinder Chadha)
23/Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle ** (McG)
24/Beyond Borders ** (Martin Campbell)
25/The Recruit ** (Roger Donaldsdon)
26/The Matrix Reloaded ** (Andy & Larry Wachowski)

Gary Ross' Seabiscuit gets off to a very bad start, with an irritating voiceover and a plodding 45 minutes of exposition, treating us to the life stories of three mismatched characters, jockey Red Pollard (Tobey Maguire), car mogul and horse owner Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges) and silent trainer Tom Smith (Chris Cooper). But as the three come together with the underdog horse Seabiscuit, the movie picks up speed and rattles along at a fine pace, with the required ups and downs. However, Ross (usually a talented writer/director) doesn't handle the great material as well as he could have, adding in too many intrusive voiceovers and historical interludes. The characters and actors are strong enough that the film would have been more successful without Ross setting the scene so much. His script is also not sufficiently strong--the characters of Howard and Smith are never fully realised, and although the two great actors playing them make it watchable enough, you still feel like it's another missed oppertunity. I was more impressed by Maguire: he gives Pollard presence and strength, overcoming cloying dialouge. William H. Macy, however, steals the show once again in a hysterical performance as radio announcer Tick-Tock McGlaughin.
Overall, it's enjoyable enough, the horse races are certainly exciting, and the production values are superb. But there's just a sense of a missed oppertunity here.
*** 1/2

This afternoon I attended a screening of 21 Grams at the London Film Fest, and I have to say I was very impressed by it. I loved Amores Perros, and while I think Inarritu hasn't quite outdone himself with this film, it's still a very interesting and often powerful watch.
I don't want to give away too much of the plot, which means I can't say much past the general premise: the lives of three people (Penn, Watts and Del Toro) intersecting after a series of events. The movie is jumbled, Inarritu shuffling us around a period of what seems to be about a year. This means we have scenes of a bedridden, dishevelled Penn dying of heart disease and a healthy, smooth-talking Penn after a heart transplant right next to each other. This means that the movie rests largely on the performances, and they are by far its greatest strength. Penn is, once again, pretty fantastic. It's a more subdued performance than Jimmy Markum in Mystic River, but similar in some ways, and he has some really terrific scenes.
Naomi Watts is just fantastic, really. It's the kind of thing the academy will love (lots of screaming & crying) but also something to really appreciate--a real tour de force. All the actors are great but she stood out the most to me. Her transformation from happy mother & wife to the shell that she has become at the end is remarkable.
Benicio Del Toro, as an ex-convict who has been 'saved' by Christianity, is also excellent. In the wrong hands, the character easily could have been a total cliché, but he manages to dominate all of his scenes. He also undergoes a remarkable transformation--from that of a person empowered by his faith to one who feels forsaken by God.
There are two great supporting women though, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Melissa Leo as Penn and Del Toro's respective wives. Leo especially struck me, she's very convincing as someone becoming further alienated by her increasingly fanatic husband. Again, she lifts the role beyond the cliché it could have been.
The film's fault, as is often the case with these kinds of films, is that it is slightly contrived and melodramatic at times. Mostly the acting & script makes the character development totally believeable, but occasionally I felt that their actions struck a false note. The film weathers this, though, thanks to the performances.
The film really should be seen for the acting, because that's what makes it truly worthwhile. But it's overall a great effort from Inarritu. Can't wait to see what he produces next.
**** 1/2