ANYONE who caught Ulrich Seidl's previous film Dog Days – a bleak, uncompromising effort – will know not to expect much levity from his latest. Import/Export examines the immigrant experience in modern Europe for anyone unfortunate enough to be on th
e bottom rung of the economic ladder. For Ukrainian nurse and single mother Olga (Ekateryna Rak) that means having to make a choice between supplementing her income via the sex industry or trying her luck in Austria where a friend hooks her up with cleaning jobs that expose her to soul-destroying prejudice. In a parallel narrative we follow young, unemployed Viennese security guard Pauli (Paul Hoffman) as he attempts to crawl out of his debt-ridden gutter by travelling to the Ukraine with his stepfather to eke out a dubious living servicing gambling machines. Cutting between these two stories, Seidl uses them as thematic mirrors to reflect the ugliness of modern Europe. It's bleak stuff – and utterly absorbing.
88 MINUTES (15)
*
DIRECTED BY: JON AVNET
STARRING: AL PACINO, ALICIA WITT, LEELEE SOBIESKI
TO MAKE one abysmal Al Pacino movie is bad enough, to make two in a row should be immediate grounds for movie jail – do not pass Go, do not collect any more directing fees, and definitely do not go within spitting distance of any cinematic legends. Such should be the fate of Jon Avnet, helmer of last week's putrid Pacino-starring Righteous Kill and now 88 Minutes, a rancid serial killer thriller that has been sitting on a shelf for two years but has somehow found its way into cinemas to contaminate all remaining audience goodwill towards its star. Cavorting with girls a third his age, sporting a Carlito's Way beard and spouting such choice lines as "somebody took my semen and deposited it in the victim", Pacino plays a troubled horn-dog academic-cum-forensic psychiatrist who is framed for murder and given 88 minutes to live by a mysterious sicko who may be in cahoots with a killer he helped convict. The idiotic writing, brain-freezing plot contrivances, hamfisted direction and hammier acting are bad enough, but at nearly two hours, this doesn't even have the grace to unspool in real-time.
FEAR(S) OF THE DARK (12A)
***
DIRECTED BY: BLUTCH, CHARLES BURNS, MARIE CAILLOU, PIERRE DI SCIULLO, LORENZO MATTOTTI, RICHARD MCGUIRE
ADULT animation fans turned on by the recent Persepolis would do well to check out this French-produced omnibus of six horror shorts. As with all cinematic anthologies, the varying quality of the contributions has a Kryptonite effect on the overall film, but there's some genuine greatness on display, most notably Charles Burns's creepy-crawly Cronenberg-esque tale of a shy insect obsessive whose new girlfriend is taken over by an ant-like mandible that turns her into an abusive spouse desperate to procreate. Elsewhere, attention wanders as a soggy J-horror homage about a girl haunted by a samurai goes nowhere and a gorgeously rendered story about a village terrorised by a mysterious beast heads in the same direction. Tying these segments together is a sinister tale about an 18th-century marquis and his hounds of hell that comes to a bloody resolution – a better linking device than the pretentious monologue droning on about social fears.
FLY ME TO THE MOON (U)
*
DIRECTED BY: BEN STASSEN
VOICES: TIM CURRY, CHRISTOPHER LLOYD, DAVID GORE
IT TRUMPETS itself as the "the first ever animated movie created for 3D" – erm, wasn't Beowulf in 3D? – but the initial wow-factor of having objects fly off the screen is the only thing this derivative cartoon has to offer your kids. With the five minutes taken care of, though, the rest of the film, which re-imagines the Apollo 11 moon landing from the perspective of an adolescent fly who hitches a ride with Neil Armstrong, proves that all the trickery in the world can't disguise a lazily conceived, poorly written mess. "If it's not an adventure, it's not worth doing," the hero's windbag grandfather reminds us. If only the producers had heeded his advice.
The full article contains 696 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
