The Bourne Supremacy

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Originally uploaded by Struthers.

Matt Damon is back for another round as Jason Bourne, with a new director, Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday) and a smart, fast paced script that takes us from India to Italy, Germany, Russia and the US in The Bourne Supremacy.
Greengrass uses the same hand-held camera techniques which gave Bloody Sunday its ultra-real documentary feel. This is an extremely effective and increasingly popular way (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovic) of presenting a more realistic feel of a film to the audience in order to 'soften' a situation which would otherwise seem absurd.
007 producers take note: international spy thrillers don't have to be an exercise in special effects, stumbling from ridiculous set-piece to ridiculous set-piece with a never ending body-count and cost a couple of hundred million dollars to be successful and engaging.
Taking up where The Bourne Identity left off, with Bourne, still suffering from amnesia, and girlfriend, Franka Potente (Run Lola Run) trying to stay off the radar and well out of the sight of the CIA, now living a simple life on a beach in India. But of course this peaceful existence has to come to an end, and does so as a result of Bourne being framed for the deaths of two CIA agents in Berlin, and having his own life targeted.
Bourne is a pragmatist and is not at all used to dealing with conflict verbally, his unease with people is evident, as well as his confusion with the circumstances revolving around the agents he's supposedly killed.
Joan Allen (The Contender) and Brian Cox (Adaptation, 25th Hour) do most of the talking in this film, as the CIA heads trying to find Bourne and bring him in.
The script is intelligent, twisting enough to keep the tension running through the unfurling plotlines, which never feels as though it's being spelt out.
Oliver Wood's camera work appears in the slower/dialogue scenes to be a little too shaky with no reason to be, but all is forgiven as soon as the action builds and reaches a frenetic pace by films-end with the brilliant car chase through the streets of Moscow, (don't forget to blink).
The second sequel to outdo its predecessor this year (Spiderman 2), The Bourne Supremacy is one hell of a good ride and rates 4 Stars

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS

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Originally uploaded by Struthers.

When director Stephen Hopkins approached Geoffrey Rush (Shine, Quills) to take on the title roll in the film The Life and Death of Peter Sellers he was understandably apprehensive. He'd be in every scene as the tormented comic actor, as well as portraying many of the iconic characters Peter Sellers created, and then he'd be asked at times to play some of the key characters in his personal life as well.
If it came off then Mr Rush could be well expected to start polishing his shoes and practicing self-deprecating remarks for the upcoming awards season.
Rush manages to pull all this off, and then some. As well as his uncanny performance of Sellers himself, the scenes in which Rush plays Dr Strangelove and Inspector Cleusau are pure delight.
There are other actors, notably Charlize Theron (Monster) as Britt Eckland and Emily Watson as his first wife Anne, but they come and go, merely providing a sounding board of sanity for Sellers childish antics and tantrums to bounce off.
The early years of Sellers radio career as one of the Goons along with Spike Milligan (Edward Tudor Pole) and Harry Secombe (Steve Pemberton) is glossed over rather quickly, it's from when his film career and ego really began to take off the makers were interested in. And the difficulty of finding someone on the planet who resembled the gaunt and gangly Milligan appears to have been nigh on impossible.
Wonderfully torturous scenes such as those when Sellers believes himself to be in the midst of a torrid affair with the unrequiting and happily married Sophia Loren (Sonia Aquino), provide a real glimpse into a severely scarred psyche.
His mother manipulates him, his wives manage him, his directors suffer him and his psychic rips him off, but in the end do we care? Hopkins does such a terrific job at establishing how much of an insufferable bastard Sellers was that it's difficult to have any empathy towards him, and he's in every frame.
As Sellers himself points out, if he doesn't have a character play, then there isn't much else there. In the end we're left with quite a lot of screen time of Sellers treating people, especially his children, horribly.
Three and a half stars

CONTROL ROOM

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Originally uploaded by Struthers.

Al-Jazeera is the Arab world's answer to CNN, and with 40 million viewers worldwide it is a major influence upon public opinion the region, though it is dismissed by the current White House administration as merely, 'the mouthpiece of Osama Bin-Laden'.
Control Room, by Jehane Noujaim (Startup.com), takes us inside and up close with the journalists and news gatherers working for the controversial satellite news giant as US bombs are beginning to fall on Baghdad in March of 2003.
Essentially an inside look at the Arab perspective of the 2nd Gulf War, Control Room at its core is a study of the ethics of journalistic reporting during a time of conflict, evoking those oft used sayings regarding war and the truth.
Noujaim wants to show that when CNN and Fox are televising flashy images of missiles being launched, then Al-Jazeera should not be criticized for showing where they landed, or depicting the human face of the Iraqi people we simply know as 'collateral damage'.
The recent success of documentary films at the cinema, (The Fog of War, Faranheit 9/11), would seem to highlight some of the mistrust audiences have developed for the highly controlled, 'footage and soundbite' news services that our governments have been funnelling their messages through at an increasingly sophisticated level.
Noujaim often uses contrasting footage of criticism being levied at the station from the likes of Donald Rumsfeld for reporting 'lies' and 'propaganda', with acts of editorial integrity and a deeper cultural knowledge of the Arab world, which makes some of the US journalists look positively ignorant.
This is a tightly packaged, well edited film, with engaging characters emerging from all sides of the debate, each of whom are trying to place a war into context for their respective audiences in their lounge rooms each night.

Four Stars