andidektor's reviews

Who are these people? do they exist anywhere? What are they for? What do they live on? why is anyone who actually works for a living depicted as a schmuck? Who talks like this? What purpose is there in making a film about them? How can a purportedly intelligent filmmaker reference Spanish identity and yet present the country (especially Barcelona) as a series of banal tourist postcards and cultural clichés? Does Woody Allen now live totally in his imagination? What's the intended audience for this unreal farrago? When are talented actors going to realise that adding a modern Woody Allen film to their CV is a negative? When am I going to stop watching Woody Allen films in the hope that he'll rediscover a relevant muse - or even the ability to entertain?

Tristan and Isolde. I just got the impression that this was dull, dirty and dour. James Franco as Tristan is bland, Sophia Miles as Isolde is pretty but far too modern for the role of a medieval princess. Bronagh Gallagher acts her socks off, but her protective nanny/handmaid is such a cliché… The Irish speak in cod Ulster and Scots(?) accents - well I think that's what David O'Hara was mostly speaking… Some of the cast may in fact have been American…

One moment it's almost down and dirty, earthy and violent. The next it's lyrical and pretty, playing out it's Romeo and Juliet romance drenched in high key back-light. It does a good job of showing the smallness of battles, the cramped spectacle of the tournament held in what is more like a courtyard than an amphitheatre (where the associated Scott brothers would probably have preferred it to happen). But there isn't much to sustain interest in a setting like that, especially as the contest is reduced to a sequence of short, repetitive bouts (a bit like sumo wrestling – blink and you miss it).

Mostly it's all too complicated, but just when it touches on complex themes of loyalty and love and tribal politics, it loses confidence and lurches into convoluted action sequences that twist and turn in ways that you don't care about. I lost interest in which stone paired up with which other stone representing the adversaries in the tournament, or what thick headed surprise strategies were employed to outwit the arrogant monsters that the Irish were made out to be (nothing new there eh?).

In the end it goes twee and miserable by turns, laying on the sentiment but failing to engage.

Dead Long Enough doesn't do it all by numbers and it looks very pleasant with its Irish and Welsh settings, and an attractive cast who bring warmth to a rather slight story.

It's about two brothers with distinctly different personalities, an old flame who's had a child by one or the other of them, and some guns buried on a beach.

Douglas Henshall is very good, Michael Sheen and Jason Hughes do an entertaining double act and everyone else manages to survive some potentially twee light comedy.

It's not satirical, it's not particularly exciting, and it has about as much cinematic ambition as an episode of Only Fools and Horses – but it tells its story competently, it's well performed and the low budget production makes the best of the scenery.

There are a number of elements that smack of not-having-thought-it-through. Some of the dialogue is surreal – I have no idea what the Welsh secretary was talking about for instance (you'll know it when you see it) and Joe Pasquale is out of place, yet oddly endearing as a gay soldier on border patrol… Also, there are some very strange chapter titles that don't add much to anything… and the climactic chase is a bit naff.

But it doesn't fail because it doesn't hang itself on over-ambition. It could be a whole lot worse.