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Sex Drive

US 2008

Starring: Josh Zuckerman, Amanda Crew

Director: Sean Anders

Slumdog Millionaire

UK/US 2008

Starring: Dev Patel, Anil Kapoor

Director: Danny Boyle

(co-director Loveleen Tandan)

Inkheart

US/UK/Germany 2008

Starring: Brendan Fraser, Eliza Bennett

Director: Iain Softley

The Man From London

France/Hungary/Germany/UK 2007

Starring: Miroslav Krobot, Tilda Swinton

Director: Bela Tarr

WHATEVER 2009 has got in store, in terms of new releases it’s certainly starting in dramatic style. Already we have plausible candidates for the categories of the most over-rated and under-rated film of the year: Slumdog Millionaire and Sex Drive.

The former – relating how penniless Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) achieves sensational, controversial success on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? – is a heart-warming tale of triumph against adversity, one widely expected to figure prominently when the Oscar nominations are announced. Many reckon the movie is clear front-runner for Best Picture, with Britain’s own Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) and Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty) strongly tipped for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. The American Film Institute hailed Slumdog Millionaire as  a “masterwork [that] is rooted in the worlds of Dickens and Dumas, but captures their spirit with a visual and narrative splendour that serves as a cinematic passport to a vibrant, modern India”.

It’s hard to imagine the AFI – or anyone else for that matter – comparing Sex Drive to Dickens or Dumas. As it happens, the script (by director Anders and John Morris) is, like Slumdog, based on a literary source – Andy Behrens’ young-adult-targeted All the Way – and both films perpetuate an odd idea frequently found in the movies, but hardly ever in reality: if a boy and a girl are very friendly as children, they will inevitably become romantically involved as adults.

Sex Drive is a raunchy, unashamedly youth-oriented comedy, in which 18-year-old Ian (Josh Zuckerman), desperate to lose his virginity, motors from Chicago to the Knoxville home of a “babe” he has “met” via an internet chatroom. Along the way, Ian – accompanied by his best pal (Clark Duke’) and his childhood sweetheart (Amanda Crew) – experiences various unlikely adventures, in the prescribed manner of American comedies stretching back to American Pie, Road Trip and beyond.

But if we must have raunchy, teen-oriented comedies on our screens (and, for various social and economic reasons, we surely must), then we could do much worse than Sex Drive. For one thing, it doesn’t feel like it was written by cynical 30-somethings.  The characterisation and dialogue is more convincing than, say, Diablo Cody’s inexplicably Oscar-winning work on Juno. The hit-rate of gags is respectable, the principal characters are appealing and the supporting roles more than pull their weight  – especially Charlie McDermott and Mark L Young as motormouthed duo Andy and Randy. Indeed, the numbskulled pair are such good value that one can only hope that a mooted sequel focusing on them makes it into production.

It might be stretching things to say that Sex Drive is a “better” film than Slumdog Millionaire, but their simultaneous appearance does raise an intriguing question. Is it better to aim low and broadly hit one’s target or aim high and only partially succeed? Slumdog represents a tough task for any critic  – the movie tries so desperately to entertain, while a slew of audience awards at film-festivals indicates the success of Boyle’s tactics. Unlike, say, Mamma Mia!, critical hosannas have been much in evidence. Then there’s the fact that the film is a celebration of India in general and Mumbai in particular  – subsequent bloody events in the teeming metropolis endowing the enterprise with an inadvertent, poignant topicality.

Nevertheless, it should be possible to move an audience without making us feel like we’re being manipulated – and Slumdog Millionaire is nothing if not manipulative. It’s a frenetic, kinetic experience, full of colour, sound and camera-trickery, but at heart it’s a rather mechanical combination of The Usual Suspects (gimmicky story structure), City of God (hardship of slum-dwelling kids), and The Darjeeling Limited (India as soulful source of visual stimulation), plus a dash of Quiz Show. What Boyle and Beaufoy (adapting Vikas Swarup’s novel Q & A) have in mind is a modern-day cinematic fable, a rollicking yarn of a movie which barrels us along so insistently that we don’t have time to notice the many gaping holes in its plot or its thudding reliance on coincidence, contrivance and melodrama.

Sex Drive, by contrast, is an unassuming sort of ride – ironically, given its chosen genre  – one that’s somewhat quiet and sedate in comparison with its headline-grabbing, Oscar-destined “rival”. Neither rank as must-sees, but both are worth a look.

With no new Tolkien adaptation due until 2011’s The Hobbit and the next Harry Potter instalment delayed until summer, the producers of opulent literary-themed fantasy Inkheart are clearly hoping their movie can profitably fill a vacuum. Based on a teen-oriented bestseller by novelist Cornelia Funke (“the German JK Rowling”) the picture has been given a PG certificate for “moderate fantasy violence and scary scenes”.

The plot revolves around itinerant bookbinder/collector Mo (Brendan Fraser) and his 12-year-old daughter Meggie (Bennett), who both possess a rare gift whereby characters from any stories they read aloud become flesh-and-blood reality. Unfortunately, for every such action there’s an equal, opposite reaction. Nearby individuals are sucked into a literary netherworld – the fate suffered by Mo’s wife Resa (Sienna Guillory.) To regain their loved-one, Mo and Meggie must track down a copy of the long out-of-print Inkheart – a quest which involves the latter’s reclusive author, Fenoglio (Jim Broadbent) and Mo’s daffy, bookworm aunt (Helen Mirren).

While anything that gets kids to read can only be a good thing, Inkheart if anything rather oversells the wonderfully magical power of books. Such a message is fine in the medium of literature, but it sits oddly when expressed via cinema. If books are such an unparalleled panacea, why waste precious reading time going to the pictures at all? And while refreshingly Euro-centric in its locations and atmosphere, Inkheart is distractingly fuzzy in terms of its internal fantasy-logic. On a broader level, it’s disappointing that a movie celebrating the power of the imagination should content itself with exploring such familiar thematic and visual terrain – a little Rowling here, a bit Tolkien there and oh-so-generous helpings of Titus Groan.

Georges Simenon’s novella L’homme de Londres (1934), originally translated into English as Newhaven-Dieppe, has already been filmed three times before – twice in France (1943, 1988) and once in Britain (1947). It’s a safe bet that none of these predecessors resembled this latest version, The Man From London, in anything but the basic details of the plot.

This concerns the misadventures of middle-aged Maloin (Miroslav Krobot), who operates the signal box for a quayside railway-station, after he witnesses a murderous struggle between two men. During the scuffle a suitcase is thrown into the harbour. After fishing it out, Maloin discovers that it contains a large amount of banknotes. His impulsive reaction to this find will ultimately yield disastrous consequences for all concerned, including his malcontent wife Camelia (Tilda Swinton).

Director Bela Tarr relocates the “action” from Simenon’s Dieppe to a nameless port and, despite most of the character names being English, the dialogue is clearly dubbed into Hungarian. This outmoded technique might not have been such a nagging distraction if the story had not been presented in such numbingly slow fashion. Tarr’s fondness for punishingly extended takes makes it hard for the audience to engage with or keep track of the plot, a tortuous business of cross and double-cross.

At certain times, vision and sound do combine to striking effect, and at junctures the film succeeds in transcending narrative concerns to become a kind of inescapably static, nightmarish reverie. But this is nowhere near enough to justify the kind of investment demanded over the course of 139 protracted minutes. On close examination and subsequent reflection, there’s little that really lingers after and the credits roll. The Man From London, which was a notoriously troubled, multi-national production from start to finish (the main producer committed suicide mid-shoot), is perhaps a kind of anti-cinema – an example of the medium being deployed to intimidate audiences into cowed, awed submission, to encourage them towards a kind of hushed, humbled reverence by the supposed presence of art with a capital “A”.

Neil Young